


we live in the dreams you had

by NoFootprintsInSand



Category: Far Cry (Video Games), Far Cry 5
Genre: AU, Biting, Canon Divergence, Captivity, Church Sex, Decidedly Lowbrow, Didn’t Plan On That, Dominant Behavior, Dubious Consent, F/M, Forced Pregnancy, Joseph Plays Fast And Loose With Prophecies, Marking, Ok there might be more Deputy/John Seed than I had originally envisaged, Possessive Behavior, Spanking, Stockholm Syndrome, This Is Now A Straight Up Triangle, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2020-04-17
Packaged: 2021-01-16 14:28:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 56,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21272693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NoFootprintsInSand/pseuds/NoFootprintsInSand
Summary: “Freedom of choice is a wonderful thing. Until it’s not anymore. I fear I can no longer allow you that luxury. I fear I must avail myself of a more...hands-on approach.”Joseph takes a different route to the end





	1. Chapter 1

_ I saw a film _

_ future visions of now _

_ they changed the end _

_ cause they always do somehow _

Joakim Berg, ‘Heavenly Junkies’

* * *

_ “Deputy.” _

The husky, melodic voice over the radio stops her short. She’s grown used to hearing the barely leashed rage of John or the gritty mockery of Jacob coursing the airwaves. Used to having Faith singing and whispering inside her head.

But not _ him._

Thus far Joseph Seed has seemed content to stay in the background, have his heralds and his disciples run his errands and carry his messages. Him calling out to her now feels ominous, discombobulating, and she slowly slides her hand down to the radio clipped to her hip, puts her finger on the receiver. Doesn’t press down. She stands still on the barely-there path she’s walking, head cocked, body tense. Trying to sniff out a trap. Or perhaps, knowing her adversary, several traps. Ready to flee at the slightest hint of ambush, of _ wrongness._

“_Deputy?_” 

Her finger twitches on the call button, but she still doesn’t press it. She’s never responded to any of his siblings over the radio, and she won’t respond to him.

He seems to realise.

_ “Very well. I trust you are listening.” _

She thinks she can hear a sigh, but it might be the faint whisper of summer winds through the pines.

_ “I wish to talk to you. Meet. Face to face.” _

She shivers slightly where she stands, remembers the first time she was face to face with him

_ (“no one is coming to save you”) _

how he calmly sang as they fell through the air, how he leapt atop a car as easy as if it was nothing, the flames, the insanity and fervour in his voice as he ordered his people out to pillage and kill.

Reap.

_ “Come to my compound. Your passage is assured, and safe. You will be allowed to leave again afterwards, should you wish to do so.” _

And she remembers the last time she saw him, how the fireflies of Bliss had painted his face in warmth, she remembers the honey of his words, the deadly strength of his fingers about her face.

Her hand moves away from the receiver again and she leaves the path, heads in among the trees. Merges with the dark green smoothness of the shadows.

Disappears.

* * *

“_I would beseech you again, Deputy, to come to me.”_

She doesn’t stop what she’s doing, grimly leaping through the pumpkin patch with blood pouring down her face. Instead of answering the prophet she shoots one of his acolytes in the face and breaks the neck of a second in passing, by dint of speed and luck. She performs a violent ballet, _assemblés_ and _pirouettes_ and murder, berserker rage a snug veil over her hair and face.

_ “Thus far it’s a polite request, not a demand...” _

She hisses at the radio as she stabs her last adversary through the heart, but makes no move to answer. She’s injured. Bullet wounds, blunt force trauma. None of it, as far as she can tell, is serious. Even so, right now she’s running only on adrenaline and spite, and soon she will simply fall over. She needs to get out of here before that happens. She’s in no doubt that reinforcements are but seconds away. They always are.

_ “...but my patience is not infinite.” _

She walks towards the tree line, the scraggly hound she found sticking close to her side.

She needs sleep. 

* * *

She’s skirting the Henbane, trying to stay out of reach of the fields of Bliss, and her lip is curled at the large statue violating the horizon. 

In her short time here she’s grown to love Hope County with a ferocity that surprises her, but she likes the Henbane the least. 

Nothing is _ solid, _nothing is trustworthy. Everything can turn into something else, and Faith’s insidious, terrified siren song always straight in her ear.

She finds herself longing back to the Valley. John Seed might be a flamboyantly sadistic psychopath, but his means of persuasion pragmatic and straightforward compared to those of his siblings. She _ understands _ him, how he works, and she suspects that he might understand her right back.

Being strapped to a chair and tortured she could wrap her head about. Being forcibly drowned was, at least, _ tangible._

No conditioning left curled in her hindbrain, no making her see things that aren’t _ there._

She shakes her head, wonders at her new life trapped inside this violent bubble, how her recent normal is upside down and covered in blood.

As for the cause of all this...she’s close to growing used to his voice on her belt, preaching to the curves and slopes of her hipbone. Familiar enough, at any rate, to notice the sparking anger in his voice as he speaks now.

_ “You’ve left me no choice, Deputy. My people will come for you. It would behoove you not to resist them when they catch up with you. It wouldn’t end well.” _

She bares her teeth at his solemn statue, then turns her back on it.

The fury in his voice might be new to her, but she knows she’s got some running to do.

* * *

She might have been proud over how long it takes them. _ Proud. _She’s learnt a lot since she arrived in Hope County, fresh faced and principled and halfway naive, but none of it good. She’s learnt to kill, and run, and hide in the absence of shadows. She’s learnt how to quietly break necks, and blow up buildings and how to temporarily silence the screaming in her head. She’s learnt how to somersault her morals and become...grey.

Pride might not be the word, come to think of it.

She dodges Bliss bullets and ambushes and altered wolves for days, grimly determined to escape him, delving ever deeper into the woods, ever higher up the mountains. 

It can’t last. She’s alone against all the means at Joseph’s disposal.

So under a bloated Sturgeon moon glowing almost red her luck fizzles out and they finally catch up to her.

And _ of course _ she resists, because _fuck _ him. Fights and snarls and kicks and bites. But she is one against creatures and men, and she doesn’t stand much of a chance. She’s played them for fools for days, and they take grim pleasure in bringing her to her knees, enjoys how she resists because that means they can hurt her more.

She’s unconscious when they throw her into the back of a flatbed truck, bound hand and foot, a wolf standing sentry over her prone form.

* * *

When she wakes again it’s dawn, and they’ve stopped. She manages to wriggle herself into a sitting position, and looks out over the edge of the flatbed. On one side is the lake, with mist curling on the surface of the water and the mountains beyond. It really is more beautiful than it has any right to be. The Judge wolf standing over her growls, and she looks to her left. There’s the mud and grimness of the compound, dirty people and buildings painted in sins.

They are parked up right outside the church.

The rope that binds her is cut through by one of the nameless, faceless grunts from her capture party, then she’s picked up and dropped from the truck with a ferocious sort of indifference that she sees straight through. 

She takes bleak pleasure in landing on her feet. 

The sun is coming up, painting the mist on the lake in dogwood pink, turning gossamer to fairy dance. That shivering, shimmering borderland between reality and dream, just _ there._

Just out of reach.

She looks away from it of her own free will as she unceremoniously shoved forward through the mud, a man on either side of her, a wolf nipping at her heels. On a stilted march to the church.

One of her guards throws open the doors, another pushes her forward. Then they both fall back, calling the wolf to heel.

She steps inside with her chin high and back straight, as if one of her shirt sleeves aren’t torn off, as if she isn’t wearing fingerprints for a necklace and a black eye and a split lip like precious adornments. Canine indents in her wrist and a certain careful way of moving that betrays more. 

He comes walking from the back, jeans and bare chest and tattoos, and armed to the teeth. A rifle slung over his shoulder. A handgun in a leg holster. Knives.

And he meets her with an air of chilling, absolute authority, as if he’s wearing the crown on his head and not all fallen down onto his chest.

Behind her she hears the double doors being slammed shut and locked from the outside. In front of her the morning sun shines in dust beams from the windows, bathing him in an unearthly glow.

What fucking mockery.

He stops about ten paces out. Considers her with his head at a tilt and at least half of his thoughts obscured by yellow, the other half by what she’s pretty sure is madness.

“You’ve led me on a merry chase, Deputy. I asked you to come to me some time ago. I don’t appreciate being disobeyed.”

His voice is smooth, betrays no strong emotion. She pulls bravado about herself even though she knows it’s one of the emptiest gestures she’s ever made.

“Led _ you? _You were hardly out there hunting me yourself. You sent others to do your dirty work.”

He inclines his head, as if he’s humouring her little juvenile outburst because she just doesn’t _ know _ any better. She resists the urge to grind her teeth.

“What do you want?”

”I wish to speak to you.”

“You could’ve spoken your piece on the radio, Seed. Dragging me before you is unnecessary. You’re no better than your siblings.”

He doesn’t raise to the taunt. She didn’t expect him to.

“On the contrary. For what is about to occur it’s absolutely necessary that we meet face to face.”

He’s getting a little too close, and she walks a generous half circle around him even though it means she moves deeper into the church and away from the doors. A detached part of her realises that she’s already written off escape; she won’t get away from here until he’s gotten what he wanted, whatever that is. Another similarity to his siblings, not that she’s surprised.

He turns with her movements, never once lets her out of his sight. He moves easily, relaxed and sure, entirely in control.

He stops by a rough hewn wooden coffer. Takes a key out of his front jean pocket and opens it. Slowly and methodically he removes weapons from his person and puts them inside. The rifle. The gun from his leg holster. A knife from another holster, and one stuffed into his boot. A smaller gun worn tucked into the waistband at the back of his jeans. When he is finished he slams the lid shut and locks it again. Then he casually, _ demonstrably, _throws the key out of the open window next to him.

At her raised eyebrow he calmly explains: 

“I am unwilling to risk you availing yourself of a weapon from my person when I get close to you. You are not yet_ …amenable _ to our viewpoint.”

There are so many implications with his nonchalant statement that rattles her, but she focuses on the simplest one: that he is so sure of himself, of his strength, that he will take her on unarmed.

Of course, _ she _is unarmed too. And she is of finely wrought, briskly drawn lines and delicate bones. Though she is fleet of foot and and move like quicksilver the truth is that without weapons or the element of stealth and surprise she does not have much to set against him. 

And she senses a hungry, brute strength about him. She saw the video. He gouged someone’s eyes out seemingly without any effort at all. Like popping soap bubbles.

“The future is a mess of tangled paths, a skein of possibilities. My blessing and my curse is that the Voice allows me to see them all.”

He leaves the coffer, a hand dragging lazily along it as he slowly starts towards her again.

“All the possible outcomes. I see. Them. _ All. _And you, you are too important to what happens here. I have seen it. One wrong choice from you condemn thousands. I cannot allow that to happen. Do you understand?”

She doesn’t, and she starts backing up, matching him step for step.

“Freedom of choice is a wonderful thing. Until it’s not anymore. I fear I can no longer allow you that luxury. I fear I must avail myself of a more...hands-on approach.”

There’s a look in his eyes, swirling and familiar, that she’s trying to press down on with her thumb. Keep still for long enough for her to name it.

“You, you are incendiary. If not reined in you will burn everything you touch. It can’t happen.” His voice lowers, goes deep with threat. “I would not fight this. You _ can, _if you wish, but in the end there is nothing you can do.”

She is tangled in instincts and impulses and doesn’t know which way to turn.

“Why are you doing this?”

“My brothers and my sister seem unable to reach through to you, Deputy. And time is increasingly of essence. I saw no other recourse than to engineer you coming to me. Things were set in motion with your arrival in Hope County. To the best of my ability I intend to direct events, make them flow in ways that causes the least deaths.” 

Fury wells up, sudden and welcome, distracting her from the fact that she has no fucking idea what he’s talking about.

“‘Least deaths’? How many are you responsible for so far? The bodies hanging from bridges and signs everywhere - do they not count because _ you _ put them there?” She shakes her head. “You act as though you are a god, but you’re _ not. _And the god _ you _ worship will soon be gone. A mere yawn in time.”

“I would advise you to watch your tongue, Deputy.”

He is so near now, she can almost feel him, and she is taut and trapped in his force field. She fights against a primal urge to show him her neck, her submission, and growls at herself. She’s an intelligent, modern woman, she’s not some wild creature attempting to placate a dominant leader. But even so...the way he looks at her...his _ eyes_. They touch something deep inside her brain, a faraway place retaining snippets from generations gone; ancient knowledge, ancient instincts. 

It wells up like adrenaline, like sobs. It tells her that she has nowhere to run. She shakes herself, trying to snap out of it. _ Can’t. _Mesmerised, she’s _ mesmerised_. She understands, with sudden terrifying clarity, how he’s gained such a following; how he’s built his warped, askew little kingdom in this faraway corner of the world. 

He stops right before her, tilts his head slightly to look down at her. And she recognises the look in his eyes now, finally, she can _ name _ it. She’d seen brief flashes of it in John too, when she’d been helpless in his chair.

_ Lust_. Primeval and raw.

Closer.

He smells of ozone. Of the shivering air just after a lightning strike. Dark clouds and hovering rain.

Well, electricity used to be therapy, she thinks, and stands absolutely still. Refuses to let him back her into a wall, resolves to meet him with air and some of the the free will he wants to deny her at her back. She won’t get out of this, so she might as well stand straight and tall and _ take, _as surely as he will take from her. 

He seems to sense her acquiescence, her decision; indeed his tongue flicks out to taste it on the air between them. And then he smiles, and pushes his glasses up on his head.

With the terrifying blue of his eyes she knows she has lost. It seems tricky to care. Easier then to simply stand still and wait for him to take the last step into her.

His hand hovers mere millimetres from her face.

“Would you allow me to touch you?”

Such false gesture.

But she needs to maintain some semblance of agency. So she touches him first. Reaches out and grabs his hand out of the air, then brings it to her throat. It’s bruised and sore, and she pushes his hand hard against the hurt, want him to see, to _ feel_. His long fingers wrap about her neck, and she can feel her pulse thrum against his palm. She can feel it travel along his life line and up his wrist, to his veins. Blood meets blood, pulse meets pulse, and his fingers exerts pressure, but not enough to steal air.

He looks briefly regretful.

“I had hoped this would come to pass without injury to you. That you’d come to me without coercion and the fingerprints of others on your skin.”

She believes him only because she knows he wants those fingerprints to be _ his_.

His hand slides from her throat down to her collarbone, and his other hand joins, long fingers along the edges of the tank she wears underneath her unbuttoned, broken shirt. Travels along the sharp smoothness of the bones, to the notch at the base of her throat. She shivers. 

“You will let me undress you.”

She nods, and he taps against the pulse of her neck. Hard. An admonishment.

“I will,” she says, because he wants her assent to be a tangible thing, an undeniable thing, something he can hold up in front of her and show her later.

“It pleases me to see you so docile, even if I do suspect it’s fleeting.”

She’s damning herself and it won’t be a fleeting thing at all, she knows it won’t.

“I wish to learn your topography. Your valleys, your plains, your hidden places.”

His fingers on her neckline and then he rips her tank in two, slowly slides the pieces from her shoulders and let them fall to the dusty floor, along with her plaid shirt.

“I wish to make them _ mine._”

His hands travels down to the front of her jeans and he goes slowly, as if to mock her for not resisting him. Pops the button, pulls the zipper down. Bends before her, so certain she won’t kick him in the face, and helps her step out of her jeans and underwear and socks and boots, all in one go. He stands back up, and she is entirely naked before him. Barefoot on his rough church floor, and the light is warm around her

“You are beautiful,” he rasps, and drags his eyes up and down her. Soon his hands will follow the path of his eyes, she knows; they will be calloused and not very gentle. She sways forward towards him.

“What are you _ doing _ to me?”

She doesn’t recognise her own voice, but she supposes that’s ok, because she doesn’t recognise anything that is hers any longer. It’s hard to breathe - her lungs are working shallowly and all she can draw inside of her is him.

“What needs to be done,” he answers, and she can see how hard he strains against his jeans, how thick, how heavy. And she can see his iron control, his faith-sanctioned restraint, she can _ see _ it. Almost touch it. 

Then she can see it crack.

Though she suspects there have always been cracks in him. 

He pushes her backwards, up to the wall she’d been so determined not to be caught against. He’s so much taller than her, she could rest her cheek against the crown on his chest if she wished. His thigh moves in between her legs, she grinds down on it before she knows what she’s doing and his mouth finally catches hers. And with that something opens inside of her, a curious absence of light spills out, travels towards him. She can taste the honey and the poison on his tongue, and she moves closer, need more. Whines as she licks into his mouth, let her hands play at his nape, then up into his hair. Loosens it from its knot, lets it fall down his shoulders.

He looks so much younger this way, though no less mad. His pupils are blown wide, uneven in their dilation, eating most of his blue. She’s wishing for his wretched glasses back, to dim some of that terrible _ glow._

“Unzip me.”

She moves to obey, slides his belt out of the large buckle, runs the zipper down, then pulls him out. He throbs in her hand, she feels as though she is stroking along his heartbeats, and indeed he rumbles deep in his chest, puts his forehead down against hers. His fingers down her ribs, her thighs, then inwards, seeking, finding her. Strokes inside, flexes, plays, and she breathes hard through her nose.

“So warm. So slippery. So soon. You’re ready for me.”

He lifts her up by her hips, effortlessly, and slides her down on him, bucks inside and bottoms out in one sharp movement. She wraps her legs about his waist, throws her head back, begs and swears, even though she knows that he eats prayers, burns oaths clean out of the air.

“Yes. This is your _ place. _This is where you are meant to _ be_.” He thrusts once, hard, and she scrabbles with her hands behind her head to find purchase, to stay still for him, to meet him. “Being taken. _ Receiving _ me.”

His voice is all animal now, no trace left of the melodic, soft spoken preacher. She suspects that part of him is a lie anyway, and _ this _ part of him, the one impaling her, splitting her open around him, is his true guise. How he must fight, fight every day, every _ second _ of every day, to keep it leashed.

“I think God himself imbues your cunt,” he growls, then bends his head and grazes a nipple with his teeth before sucking hard on it. She trashes, caught between him and the wall, wails as he speeds up and slams her into the wood with each piston of his hips.

She doesn’t last long, he ensures it with his thumb pressed firmly down on her, with the way he angles his hips. She comes abruptly, right between two breaths, and she’s unprepared for the violent freefall, the way she loses herself entirely in what he demands of her. She tips her head back while trying to remember how to pull air down her lungs, and sees that he’s placed her right underneath the illuminated Eden’s Gate symbol. 

Of course.

Now when she’s seen to he speeds up, one hand around her neck and the other gripping her hip. He kisses her again, and she responds, damn her, meets his tongue ands sucks on it, licks a little of his madness from the corners of his mouth. His movements grow more erratic, harsher, then stops entirely as he throws himself as deep into her as he can go and empties. His eyes are wide open as he stares up at the tattered heavens of the church ceiling, his hands cruel on her skin. He’s quiet though, not a sound, not a word.

Then he rests his cheek on her shoulder, seems to breathe something of the gentle preacher facade back into himself, his hands softening on her hip and throat, his lips stroking the thin skin atop her collarbone.

How carefully he’s fashioned his persona. How easily it cracks about him.

He keeps her wrapped around him, walks them over to the front pew and sits them down, careful to stay inside her. Her cheek is against his heart. He strokes his hands down her back and side, gentles her, shushes her, calms her heaving flanks. Her sweat is cooling on her, making her shiver, and he frees her hair from the braid, spreads it down her back to warm her. Wraps his arms about her waist and pulls her closer up against him, rests his chin on top of her head.

“There. It’s done. Rest.”

She falls asleep with his heartbeats vibrating up against the filaments of her mind, thinking that she deserves the splinters in her back.

* * *

She awakens stretched out on the pew, with her head in his lap. Evening sun is falling sideways through the windows now, telling tales of a day gone, and he is combing his fingers through her long hair, humming softly. From somewhere he’s found a blanket, and she’s feeling warm and safe and utterly terrified.

She can feel his seed drying on the inside of her thighs.

She sits up jerkily, suddenly, and he allows it. She stands, pulls the blanket around herself to shield her nakedness, even though by now he’s intimately familiar with every dip and rise, every angle and plain of her body and skin. 

“My clothes.” 

“Filthy and torn. I had them thrown away.” He runs his hand across clothing sitting neatly folded next to him on the pew, then hands it to her. “You may have this.”

So his acolytes had been in here, seen her as she slept on him, as he stroked her like a skittish pet. She shivers, and takes the piece of clothing from him, because the alternative is to escape wrapped in a blanket. It’s a simple linen dress, knee length and pine green, pin tucks across the chest. There’s no underwear.

Realising the folly of trying to hide herself from him _ now _ she drops the blanket to the floor. He leans back in the pew, arms stretched out along the backrest on either side of him, and lets his gaze slide along her as she pulls the dress over her head. She meets his eyes and there is the roaring _ hunger _ again, insatiable and sharp of fang.

The dress fits her perfectly.

“It suits you. Brings out your eyes.”

He gestures towards the closed doors.

“Staying here, with me, will make it easier on you. Otherwise run now, if you like. But know that with this act I have cut away a _ multitude _ of strands of future possibilities - us coming together formed a scythe.”

He stands, comes to her side, touches his hands to her lower back as she starts towards the exit. Makes it seem as though he is escorting her out. 

“The future is clearer now. Know that in the end, it will be you and I, no matter what you do. No matter how you run. No matter how you fight.” He stops her by the doors, slides his hand from her breasts down to her belly, splays his fingers across it and smiles. Then moves to her hip and grasps it, uses it to pull her flush against him. “But it’s still up to you whether it will be easy way...or the hard.”

He leans down and kisses her, slips his tongue into her mouth, claims her absolutely, irrevocably. 

The lover. 

Then he steps back, and presses a gentle kiss to her forehead. 

The Father.

And she, she throws open the church doors, and she runs straight into the summer evening.

He doesn’t stop her. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you that have read ‘Swallow’, this little story was born from the encounter my Dep had with Joseph in chapter six. I really just wanted to see if I could write him, and ended up loving it so much that I wrote loads. Too much. So I then had to cut most of it out because it didn’t fit into the narrative of ‘Swallow’, which was only ever about the Deputy and John and their fucked up love story. So this springs from that, and my conviction that Joseph is totally the worst of the siblings. All mild mannered and pious with blood-soaked hands. Much darkness lurks just under the surface, and I wanted to explore just a little of that.
> 
> The title for this fic comes from the song ‘Heavenly Junkies’, written by Joakim Berg.
> 
> I don’t have a beta for this, and English isn’t my first language, so feel free to hit me up with mistakes that you spy.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well. This is turning into the most gratuitous, morally dubious thing I’ve ever written and I’m... sorry?

* * *

**Chapter 2**

* * *

  
_ “I see what you’ve done. I know what you’re doing.” _

A Pavlovian response to his voice she didn’t think possible stops her in her tracks, something curling inside her, something rushing darkly through her veins that isn’t blood but might be fear or might be supplication. 

_ What has he done to me what has he done what is he **doing**_

She looks down; she’s got several levels and ledges to climb before she’s safely back on the ground. She’s so high up; the view is equal parts heartbreakingly beautiful and terrifying, and she’s eye-level with goshawks. The wind tugs at her, blows her hair about her face, and for a vain, fancy moment she thinks it might wrap itself around the lines of her and carry her away from his voice.

She hesitates for just a second, then unclips the radio from her belt. She’ll break her own rule. She’ll answer.

“Joseph…”

_ “I’m not angry, but I’m disappointed. My people are coming for you, so that I might show you my displeasure.” _

Then he’s gone, and she considers her situation. It’s been weeks since the church, and she’s spent the time attempting to shake off his insidious grip on her, shut out his words, his lies. She’s tried to channel the hunger he put inside of her into destruction, not...longing.

And now...

Over there approaching helicopters and men with RPGs and hordes of Faith’s angels.

And over here stands she, surrounded by crumbling pieces of statue, brutally French-kissed by reality.

* * *

She doesn’t resist. Never let it be said that she doesn’t learn from her mistakes, she thinks as they twist her arms in impossible ways up her back and kick her legs out from underneath her, truss her up, then throw her into the backseat of a truck. At least she’s still conscious.

She’s brought back to the compound well past sunset, but there is still enough light to see by. Blue shadows and camp fires, headlights from cars and the harsh glow of religious fervour.

They take her to his home this time. A one room cabin, austere and simple but softened around the edges with candlelight. Whitewashed walls and dark woods and sparse, functional furniture. A full bookshelf. The Eden’s Gate symbol over both the bed and the table, worrying away at her peripheral vision. 

She’s not alone with her guards for long. Through the open door she sees Joseph walking through the darkness from the direction of the church, and even at a distance she can read anger in the way he moves, in the careful way he carries himself. He’s fully dressed, perhaps he’s coming from his Sunday sermon, but by now she’s lost track of the way the days flow. It could be Thursday for all she knows and cares.

As soon as he steps over the threshold into his home the guards let go of her arms and leave. With the door slamming shut behind them she is left to pick away at her déjà vu. Without a word he steps far too close to her, takes the knife out of the leg holster and slices through the rope around her wrists. As soon as her arms are free she pulls away from him, keen to put some distance between them, even if it’s hopeless.

“That was quite the little statement you made out there earlier. Faith is terribly upset.” His voice grows cold, his eyes hard. “I had to send her to bed early.”

The little hairs on her neck stand straight up at his words, and she walks around the perimeter of the room, trying to gather her wits. Though she can already feel it all slipping through her fingers, falling onto the floor. This space is far too small for a man like him, his energy climbing the walls, making the air around her shiver.

When she doesn’t answer he stalks across the floor in just two long steps, grabs her about her shoulders and spins her around to face an old mirror hanging next to the bed. He stands close behind, his front pressed against her back, and she can’t breathe.

“Look at yourself. Look at that. Not a _ hint _ of repentance.”

His voice is as stern as a commandment, and she looks.

The mirror disabuses the notion of vanity, the glass warped and murky and faraway, and she suits it; she’s got a face from a postcard sent a hundred years ago. Girlish. The round cheeks of a child and delicately sketched lips. Dusky eyes, straight brows, dark curls about her forehead and temples. A face for sepia, and she stares at herself, and she looks like a ghost wearing jeans and Kevlar.

His thoughts seem to travel alongside hers.

“You’re not wearing the dress I gave you.”

“Hard to blow things up while wearing a dress.”

“Ah, yes.” His hands on her shoulders become briefly painful before he catches himself and strokes gently down her arms instead. She can sense the brute strength slithering between their skin though, his need to subjugate and hurt. “Terribly juvenile way you have of trying to assert your independence. Because I assume that’s what you were doing? Breaking my things like that. _Rebelling_.”

She moves away from underneath his hands, positions herself near the door.

It seems a wise move.

“That statue was a fucking eyesore and a mockery to the people not under your thrall. You know that.”

He continues as if though she hasn’t spoken, and her fingers curl into fists.

“You are too wilful. Your poor impulse control is destructive and deadly. I fear your insolence must be...punished.”

Her laughter gets stuck in her throat when she sees the look in his eyes. He’s serious. 

“But you said you _ weren’t _ angry!”

“I’ve had time to reflect, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I am, in fact...awfully vexed. And you, if you act like a naughty child, then as a naughty child you will be treated.”

He crosses his arms over his chest, and his gaze swoops to the left, ponderous and bleak.

“As a young boy, when I’d acted out of turn, my father would trash me. Many times he’d trash me for no reason at all. Very fond of his leather belt, was Old Man Seed.”

His intent now becoming clear to her, she backs up a step, fumbles for the door handle behind her. It’s locked. He smiles ever so slightly at what he sees, and chuckles when she draws a deep breath.

“No one here will come to your aid. You could scream this place down, and you likely _ will _ before I’m done with you, and they will all ignore it.”

She swallows her shout while he goes to sit on one of the old wooden chairs, his movements full with a terrible purpose.

“Remove your clothing.”

“What? No!”

“No?” His eyebrows raise infinitesimally “You will remove your clothes, or I will remove them for you. You might not like the way of the latter option.” His eyes flash behind his aviators, the ruthless cruelty of a predator. “I really am very angry. Furious, even. And quite determined to teach you a lesson.”

He spreads his legs a little, rests his hands on his thighs. 

“Now undress. The quicker we get this over with the better.”

“Joseph. _ Joseph_. You’ve got to be joking. This is ridiculous! _ Of course _ I blew up that statue, I’m...”

“_Undress_!”

At his growl her fingers fly to her shirt buttons, seemingly on their own accord, carried by some unfathomable primitive instinct, the same impulse that had made her want to bare her neck for him in the church. She stops herself with great effort, let’s her hands fall back down to her sides. Clenched. White knuckles.

“You’ve got some kind of power over me,” she whispers, “and I detest you for it. Hate you for it.”

“No,” he answers, and his voice is sharp. “Not _ hate_. I won’t allow you to hate me.”

He leans forward, eyes near incandescent behind the glasses, and she knows there is something inherently wrong with him, with his mind. 

“You can’t fight your way out of this and you can’t run, Deputy. You have ten seconds, and then I’ll come over there. I’ll assure you that will be ten trips worse.”

There is also something about him, a glamour, a charisma, that forces obedience and warps her will in kinks and knots as she fights against herself and him. The force of his determination, his demand, is like static in her hair, sparks on her skin.

Ozone and electricity. 

“_Fuck_,” she whispers to herself as her hands goes back to her shirt buttons. 

She undresses quickly, expeditiously, with furious, jerky movements. There’s nothing sensual about the way she does it but she can still see him wet his lips when she finally stands naked before him, chin high and burning eyes.

He nods once in approval before patting his lap.

“Come here.”

She’s rooted to the spot.

“Can’t I just….” she gestures vaguely towards the table, and clenches her teeth.

“No. Here,” and she starts across the floor towards him, fury painting her skin in delicate shades of pink.

When she reaches him he grabs her waist and pulls her down across his lap. Her bare breasts are pressing against the denim of one of his thighs, her belly against the other. She’s too short to be able to support herself against the floor on either side of him with hands or feet, she’s dangling off his lap and is entirely reliant on him to keep her from falling. He drags his hand lightly up her spine, then presses down between her shoulder blades, effectively keeping her pinned and still. Her behind is sticking up in the air this way, and with his free hand he strokes slowly down her cheeks and thighs.

She’s never felt so vulnerable and so angry and so heavy with a need to _ yield. _Rub her face against his thigh and ask for forgiveness, even if she’s not sure for what.

She’s not done anything wrong.

Without any warning his hand comes down on her buttocks, much harder than she would have ever thought. It’s all she can do not to yelp, or gasp. She bites her knuckle and swears she won’t give him the pleasure of as much as a hint of a whimper.

He strikes again, and again, and she groans mutely against the heat, the need to wriggle, rub her thighs together, the urge to tear his jugular out with her teeth.

“I would use a cane, or my belt, but I wish to feel your skin beneath my hand. I wish to feel it grow hot.” 

His voice is even, but she can hear the predator in it, the rumble deep in his chest.

Several more smacks, and she can’t hold still anymore, adrenaline urging her to fight or flee, but her position allowing her the option of neither. Each strike pushes her down, rubs her against the rough denim of his leg, and the warring sensations become something almost surreal, colours and emotions splashed against the inside of her skull.

“How _ beautifully _ you squirm on my lap.”

Four, five, six more spanks and she can’t keep quiet anymore either, whines and moans spilling out, and it’s all she can do to swallow her pleas back down, choke on them.

Because she doesn’t know if she would beg for him to cease, or to continue. She is standing lost at the confused crossroads between pain and pleasure, can’t separate one from the other, synapses and instincts firing signals every which way.

He enjoys her vocalisations, even if he’s not getting her words.

“Yes. Perhaps a good hiding will finally make you see _ sense._”

A knock comes on the door and she stiffens even more in her uncomfortable position. 

“_Father _?” 

“Yes?” Joseph calmly calls out, as his hand slaps down on her right cheek with a sound that reverberates around the small space. 

_ “A new shipment of Bliss was just received. Do you wish to oversee?” _

“No.” _ Smack_. “I trust you all to handle it.” _ Smack_. “I will be with you later” _ smack “ _just as soon as I’ve finished my conversation with the Deputy.”

“_Very well_.”

She can hear the man’s footstep fall away through the thin walls, and wonders how much of their activities carries through, how much can be heard outside by his mindless faithfuls. She grunts at a particularly loud smack, and doesn’t care anymore, cares only about deciding between sobbing and imploding.

He stops suddenly, and runs a long finger slowly between her flaming cheeks, finds her slit. Drags his finger through all the wetness there, and chuckles darkly under his breath.

“I see.” He slips his finger inside her, sinks easily in to the knuckle. “Yes. I thought this might leash you. Someone as wild as you, as unruly and as headstrong, tend to secretly yearn to be controlled. To be _ ruled_. To _ submit_.”

“Fuck you.”

But she pushes back against his finger, and whimpers at the loss when he pulls it out so he can spank her again, punish her for her lip.

Then he stands and takes her with, gently sets her on her feet. 

“Bend over the table.” His voice is curt, short, but dark resonances underneath.

She grasps the edge, clutches the wood so hard she wonders that a crack doesn’t travel across the tabletop like over the thawing surface of a frozen lake. She’s furious with herself for submitting like this, for...for liking it. 

Yet she’s presenting for him, arched back and head hanging down between her arms. Her flanks are heaving as if she’s been running for miles without stopping, and sweat is beading like pearls on her brow.

What is this ravenous vortex he’s spiralled into existence inside her? She clutches at shame because it makes the most sense, even though it’s very nearly swallowed alive by hunger.

He comes up behind her and stands so close that his belt buckle digs into her sore backside, soothes with its coldness, hurts with its sharp edges. His thoughts move with hers again, effortlessly, smoothly.

“Don’t be too hard on yourself. You held out on me for a long time. Longer than most. You are strong of will, Deputy.”

The noise she emits is something caught between a whimper and a growl, but she doesn’t move, obediently stays where he placed her.

“Spread your legs.”

She does, and her breath stutters when he sinks to his knees behind her, runs his hands slowly up the back of her thighs to her cheeks and spreads them obscenely. Then he leans forward and licks into her from behind and she wails.

She’s already so close.

Perhaps he can feel her clench around his tongue, because he withdraws again, speaks against her left buttock, fingers stroking her where hip meets groin. 

“No. You’ll reach your end around me or not at all.”

She looks over her shoulder as he stands up from her, glistening chin and mouth, tip of his tongue gliding slowly around his lips. He undresses leisurely, uncaring that she is watching. And she, she stays bent over the table, fingers running along the wood, not letting her eyes off him until he stands naked behind her, lean and scarred and spilling over with madness.

He grabs his cock in hand, run long fingers up and down himself as he steps back into her.

“I’ll have you again, and again, and again, and you will take me each time, won’t you, Deputy?” he murmurs as he lines himself up, as he thrusts inside her with one long stroke, hips slapping against her when he bottoms out. 

She wails, and drops down on her elbows, his thrusts pushing her into the edge of the table. She arches her back even deeper to take more of him, and she knows she won’t last long. She’s been hurled sideways over the edge since he first touched her, since he merged submission with pain with lust and forced her head underneath the surface, forced her to draw it all deep into her lungs.

Drown in it.

Oh, how brutally and how skilfully he plays her.

He reaches around and presses the pad of his thumb down on her, and stars are born and others goes supernova and dies on the back of her eyelids, and she lets go. Tumbles and falls, spins out of control and snags on sharp pieces of him as she goes.

When she slams back into awareness he’s still hurtling in and out of her, motions sharp and uncoordinated now, straddling the line to painful. But then again everything he has done to her has danced atop the word painful, gleeful and cruel. This is no different.

This time he’s not quiet. He growls with his release, fierce and wanton and sure in his claim, one hand on her shoulder and one on her hip as he pulls her back into him, again and again, spills as deep inside her as he can come.

When he’s caught his breath he picks her up in his arms, easily, as though she weighs nothing, and carries her over to the bed. Lays her down on it, and follows. She curls up against him and allows him to stroke her hair, even though she shouldn’t. 

It’s a relief to feel herself slowly come back, her identity trickling back inside her in fits and starts. But still she stays pressed into his side, still and quiet, determined not to fall asleep. And he hums and sings to her, the notes and the unintelligible words snagging on her lips and eyelashes, winding about her hair.

Time has stopped. Time stands still.

Only their heartbeats are moving freely, seconds and minutes and years, yes, perhaps _ years_.

But it must end. She’s still herself, she steps back into her identity like a silken gown she would never wear and stands from the bed. He lets her go, but his eyes are calm, unworried. Sure.

She decides not to fret about that right now.

She winces as she pulls her underwear and jeans back on, her buttocks on fire, bruises along her hips and sides. 

“Will I be allowed to leave?”

He remains on the bed, arms behind his back, comfortable in his painted and scarred skin.

“Of course. For now you are free to come and go as you wish.”

Go. She will definitely _ go_.

“Will I get my weapons back?”

Here he laughs.

“I think not. Though you are nothing if not resourceful. I feel sure you will have a new arsenal before long.”

She picks up her bra and shirt from the floor, puts them on while he watches, then laces on her boots. She walks towards the door, intending to leave without any more words spoken, but stops herself. Turns back towards him. 

“You called me Hell. Back in the church, the first time we saw each other.”

He smiles, and his eyes flash with white hot fire just for a moment. He stands from the bed, walks towards her, and the candlelight softens the zeal about him, makes him seem like an almost normal man.

“I did. And you could be. You could be…just _ hell._ You could lay so much to waste, indiscriminately, indifferently.” He steps closer still. “Or you could be Hel. Goddess. The destruction wrought by you could be...targeted. Harnessed. _ Compassionate_.”

“Harnessed by you, I take it.” Her voice is a sneer.

“You still fight against me. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I need you strong, and fierce, and proud. You won’t survive in the new world otherwise.”

He reaches her, takes a hold of her hand, brings it to his mouth. Runs his lips long the thin skin on the inside of her wrist, flicks his tongue out to trace across the blue veins.

“The sound of your rushing blood is beautiful to me. One day it’ll rush only for me.”

She shakes her head.

“I think what you believe is insane. I think _ you _ are insane.”

It seems important that he’d know.

As she turns towards the door he grasps her wrist again, tugs her back towards him, make her collide with his chest. 

“Will you behave now? Will you be good?”

She looks him straight in the eyes.

“No.”

* * *

Now more than ever she wants to go against against Joseph's plans, his tailored little prophecy. She wants to hack it to _ pieces_.

She wants to break more of his things.

She wants to _ kill._

So she heads straight from the compound to Holland Valley and all but knocks on John Seed’s door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So. This chapter was meant to have a section with John and a bit of Actual Plot at the end, but apparently I'm the kind of person that gets carried away writing scenes about spanking, so I had to cut that out and it will have to go in the next chapter instead, or THIS chapter would've been too long. I'm the worst.
> 
> Also, very very tired and I've just stared myself blind at this and don't even know anymore. English not my first language blah blah, any mistakes hit me up etc etc.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just John in this chapter. This “Joseph/Dep one-shot”...well, it ISN’T anymore. Not even sure why I'm surprised. I can’t ever keep shit contained.

* * *

**Chapter 3**

* * *

It’s in the middle of the night by the time she saunters up to the guard hut outside John’s Gate. It’s overcast, no stars, no moon, making her feel claustrophobic even while still outside. Like the night itself is touching down on the crown of her head, preparing to settle about her hair, her shoulders.

She looks around her, takes everything in, bathed as it is in harsh striplight. The first time she was brought here she was unconscious, and she didn’t exactly take a good look behind her while escaping again. 

It’s ugly. Crates and trucks, concrete and chain link, crudely painted words and slogans. The bunker itself a vile wound in the crust of the earth.

She thought John Seed a man of better taste than this.

She taps on the window to the hut, smiles winningly at the two men making up the skeleton crew.

“Your Herald, so bold and brave - might he be available at this ungodly hour?”

Faintly she enjoys the look on their faces. At least up until the point they shove her own face down in the dirt as they secure her wrists behind her back.

She’s starting to feel that these days she’s more tied up than not.

She is treated comparatively gently, though she earns herself a split lip when she refuses to park her sore backside on the chair down in his blood-soaked confessional. She’s eventually zip-tied to his work bench instead, and left standing while the youngest Seed brother is fetched.

She leans against the bench, exhausted from her time with Joseph, and her mind dives and soars in broken loops, like injured falcons, just barely keeping from crashing to the ground. She thinks about the man she’s about to meet again; she thinks of her last time in this room.

She’d felt a strange grip on him then, just as she could sense his slippery grasp on _ her,_ and it worries her less than it should. 

Because she shouldn’t be able to _ know _ him. He should be too alien and fucked up for comprehension.

So mercurial. Damaged, twisted. _ Sadistic._ Highly intelligent. Wielding his intense empathic abilities for dark purposes, devilish and unprincipled, yet believing himself tied to and bound by religious scruples.

And still he’s the Seed sibling she can grasp and _ understand _ the most. 

What does that say about her, she doesn’t wonder. 

She knows.

He’s not his usual impeccable self when he finally shows up. A half tucked t-shirt and his hair falling into his eyes, stubble around the groomed lines of his beard and heavy lids.

“Oh I’m _ so _ sorry! Didn’t mean to disrupt your beauty sleep.”

He ignores her bright insincerity, reaches into his back pocket and comes out with a packet of Camels. He sticks one between his lips, lights it up. She finds herself jealous of the almost obscene pleasure he seems to take in dragging the poison down his lungs, out his nose.

“I thought you lot didn’t partake in any vices. Or fun. Unless of course you count murder and torture as fun.”

He shrugs, brushes her commentary off like lint on his shoulder.

“What can I do for you, Deputy?”

She inhales, knows that he can do nothing for her, _ no_, not someone like him. But she speaks anyway.

“I’ve come to parlay.”

He looks at her wrists tied to his table, and raises his eyebrows in exaggerated, faux amazement. 

“You’re tied up and at my mercy. How, pray tell, do you believe yourself to be in a position to negotiate?”

Well, she _ doesn’t_, not really. But she feels strangely loose, like pieces of her are tumbling freely around inside her skin and inside the bones of her skull. And she trusts in his desire to own some of those pieces, she trusts in his urge to reach through her skin and muscles and blood and bone so he may _ take_.

She isn’t as sure about the _ give _part of a potential agreement, but recklessness tastes like fresh peaches on her tongue. Juicy and sweet and a little tart.

“Release Hudson, and you can give me my fucking tattoo.”

He doesn’t laugh in her face. He seems strangely serious, even as unkempt and tired as he is. He studies her carefully, and with a quiet purpose. It’s enough to unnerve her, used as she is to his shimmering mania and finely honed cruelty.

“Why? Why now?” he asks, and his voice is even and quiet. She wonders if he knows honesty, what it feel and taste like, how it behaves. 

“I’ve been made to feel...powerless. A...a fucking _ puppet_. I need some agency back. Need to make some choices of my own. Need to feel like I’ve made some kind of difference.”

He does laugh now, but it’s not as cruel as it could be. 

Just about.

“And you do that by getting yourself tied up? Psychologists might have a field day analysing that, Deputy.”

“There are lots of different ways of being free, and lots of different ways of being trapped. I think you know some of that too, John Seed.”

He deflects, deftly and surely.

“_You _ know you won’t get the tattoo without confessing.”

No problem.

Because she finds that she do want to confess, she wants to hurl it at him, let it spill out on the floor, let it flow towards him and soak into the leather of his boots, the hem of his jeans.

She’s in no doubt that somehow this is Joseph’s doing. He’s still inside her, curled about her spine.

Even so.

“Fine. I’ll give you a confession.”

It’s not hard to say the words. Not hard at all. Her voice is a shrug. Then again she doesn’t intend for him to have everything. She doesn’t intend for him to have much at all. 

Just _ enough._

“Then, we have a deal. Your deputy Hudson will be released come morning, though know it’s utterly foolish. She’s safe down here. Up there…” he looks towards the heinous antler light, towards the ceiling, “well, not so much. She’ll perish with the rest of them come the Collapse.”

She’s strangely disappointed that he believes Joseph’s ramblings. She thinks she might be more comfortable with the thought that he only _ pretends _ to believe so that he has an excuse to hurt people, then she shies away from it. Thinking that, understanding that, might make her worse than him.

He comes closer, leans his hip against the opposite side of the work bench from her, legs crossed. A pose she’s seen him strike before, one she imagines he moves into often down here, fluid and sure. So at home with torture and gasped secrets. He’s not holding anything to hurt her with though. Perhaps he is so confident in his own words, in their power to whip and lash, that he’ll use _ them _ to draw blood instead of knives and screwdrivers.

She mirrors him, casual and tied up. They stand looking at each other, and her mind is going at breakneck speed and her mind is going slow. Her tongue worries at the wound in her lip, making it bleed again. She clings to the copper tang.

“Do you know what I find interesting about you? I’ve always been fascinated with strong contrasts. Juxtapositions. And you, you’ve got the face of a child. An innocent. All big eyes and soft skin and delicate wrists. Yet you kill mercilessly and indiscriminately. You seem to enjoy it, too.”

That peculiar mixture of venom and song in his voice. It sweeps sweat across her brow and forehead, curling her hair even more. Corkscrews brushing her temples.

“Do you?” he asks as an aside, as something casual and unimportant. “Do you enjoy it?”

She shakes her head, but even she doesn’t know if it’s to answer ‘no’ or if it’s a rejection of the question itself. And it doesn’t seem to matter to him, with the way he continues. 

“Those big eyes of yours. Everything is in the eyes. Did you know? _ Everything_. Always.”

He moves closer, so close that if her wrists weren’t tied to the bench she could reach out and touch his chest, so close that she has to tilt her neck back to meet his eyes. They shine noctilucent down here which is strange, she thinks, strange that they should be that colour when they are so far from the open heavens of the night, separated by earth and steel and concrete and a soft layer of clouds.

“I want to rip every single thought and secret out of your head, but I don’t have to, because I can take anything I want from your eyes.”

Oh, she’ll give him one for free regardless.

“I fucked your brother,” she says and licks blood from her lips. “And I enjoyed it. And I hate that I enjoyed it.”

“Is that so?” says John blandly. Too blandly. “Which one?”

Her laugh is genuine and unexpected, surprising her.

“Joseph.”

Something shiny and cruel burn in his eyes then, and she thinks at least a little of it is jealousy. Since the first time in his chair she’d sensed possessiveness about him. If he can’t be the one to own her soul then at least he want to be the one to rip it to shreds and tie those shreds around his wrist like friendship bracelets.

“In that case I suspect it was really _ Joseph _ fucking _ you_.”

“Oooooh. Touché,” she murmurs, and there’s nothing bright about her anymore.

“Did he hurt you?”

An unanticipated question.

“Yes. No. Well. Not in the way I imagine you mean. He bent me entirely to his will. Entirely. He will likely do it again. It’s….terrifying.”

More pieces of her seem to rattle loose, seem to spill out of her mouth like pearls of bile.

“Do you know something? After extensive and thorough research I can conclude that _ you _ are the lesser of the Seed evils. You! How fucked up is that?”

She’s realising that she’s crying. Doesn’t care, even if it’s unexpected.

“Jacob broke my mind. Put things inside it that should _ never _ be there. Faith...oh _ Faith_. And Joseph…” She takes a deep breath, laughs through her sobs. “He’s the worst of you. And I can’t tell him no. Or stop him. He is so _ sure _ that he’s right, so _ sure _ he’s doing what is best. Convinced that his delusions are _ real. _What can I ever set against that?”

She turns her face to wipe her snot and her tears on her shoulder.

“When I’m near him I can’t stop him. I don’t _ want _ to stop him. There. A confession. One that is even _ true_, John. How about that?”

He sighs, rubs his eyes. His hair like bird wings down his forehead, his tattoos undulating on his skin. She wants to trace them, wants to thread the seven sins like rings around her fingers.

“Joseph are many things, little Deputy, and ‘right’ is somewhere around the top of the list. Never doubt that.”

“Right now, doubt is all I have.”

He inclines his head.

“Soon enough you’ll realise how wrong you are. Perhaps you’ll even live to make amends for it.”

She laughs hoarsely.

“Making amends is definitely at the bottom of _ my _ list.” She shifts on her feet, uncomfortable in her restrained position. “Anyway. Hudson?”

“First things first, Deputy.” 

He cuts through the cable ties with a sharp attention in his stance that belies his outwards nonchalance. He’s ready to pounce and take her down should she try anything. 

“Have a seat.” He gestures to the chair as if it’s a Louis XIV antique and not a battered office chair covered in blood and shit and piss, old screams still vibrating inside the metal frame.

She actually starts towards it, intent on getting herself the full authentic experience, but as she walks she is painfully reminded of her bruised, tender behind.

“Actually, I think I’d rather stand.”

He shrugs, and allows her to stand next to him by the workbench. Allows her to unbutton her shirt herself and pull her tank down to grant him access.

He decorates her skin carefully and diligently, one hand on her shoulder, face close to her. She finds herself strangely soothed by his breath and his hair sweeping across her collarbone as he works, by the needle pressing ink and sin deep into her epidermis. Joseph’s spend leaking out of her all the while, making her jeans chafe, her mind spin with lust and abhorrence.

She has always valued her free will above all.

John finishes with a flourish, steps back and throws his arms out, a sardonic tilt to his brows. She squints downwards, tries to read the letters upside down.

“Still going with ‘wrath’, huh? Not ‘lust’, in light of recent revelations?”

He shakes his head and leans back against his workbench, another cigarette dangling from his lips, a curious absence of torture implements in his hands. He checks his watch.

“It’s day up there now. Hudson will soon be free, and you got your tattoo. Now tell me. What are you _ really _ doing here, Deputy?”

“I _ really _ came to kill you.”

“Oh?” He throws his arms wide, presents himself, makes himself a wide open target. Violence brims over in his gaze. “Have at it then. Give it your best.”

“Changed my mind.”

* * *

She ensures that Hudson is really free, then she leaves Holland Valley, John’s ash-coated laughter curled in her ears, his tattoo alive on her chest. She refuses to dwell on why he still lives. Why she didn’t kill him when she might have had the chance.

She heads straight for the Whitetails, and she does not extend that same mercy to Jacob. 

She kills him because she is small, and delicate, but with guns and knives and bombs in her hands she becomes a goddess of death, ruthless and bloodthirsty and feral, and at least part of that was wrought by him. _Belongs_ to him.

To Jacob.

So she gives him some of it back.

She kills him. Shoots him, injures him mortally. Stands calmly before him as he dies, as he laughs so much that blood gushes from his mouth, and he tells her that it won’t work, that she can’t cut it out by killing him, and she tells him well, it was worth a try.

...and she feels nothing. 

_ Nothing _.

* * *


	4. Chapter 4

* * *

**Chapter 4**

* * *

  
  


_ “What have you done, Deputy? What did you do?” _

It’s John coming through on the radio, not Joseph, and that surprises her. It terrifies her too - it confirms to her that Joseph is saving himself for a face to face confrontation. The thought is enough to make her nauseous with conflicting instincts. 

The urge to flee. The urge to fight: face him head on.

The _ need _ to see him.

Though she suspects that seeing him might not be very beneficial to her health.

But she had to...she had to do what she did. There was no other way.

She regrets nothing.

She grabs at the radio because she realises that she’s moved quite beyond ignoring John Seed’s calls. They parlayed down there in his dungeon; they had a dialogue, reached a fucked-up understanding. 

Then she went and tore uncountable bullets through the body of his oldest brother. 

She puts the radio to her mouth, so close she can taste the metal casing, iron on her tongue.

“John. I’m here.”

There’s silence for a couple of heartbeats, as if he hadn’t really expected her voice, but he gathers himself quickly enough.

“_What did you do?_” he asks again even though he knows, and she realises that he wants her to confess, that confessions are his comfort, his nourishment; his bread, his wine.

Body and blood.

“I killed your brother, and I didn’t kill _ you_.”

She wonders if he has it in him to feel guilt for Jacob taking his place. She hopes so.

_ “Did you expect my gratitude?” _

_ “Are _ you grateful?”

She hears the rage as a beating susurrus around the edges of his voice, and she hears grief too as he answers without answering her question.

_ “Did you enjoy the spectacle celebrating my brother’s death? Did you enjoy the fireworks and the cheers?” _

“No.” Her voice is much smaller than she would have wished. She doesn’t tell him that she hadn’t stayed around for the festivities of a liberated region, that she had simply left the Whitetails as soon as she confirmed that Jacob’s heart was still and cold. Left the destruction of the bunker to Staci, to Eli and his militia.

_ “Did he suffer?” _

She doesn’t answer his question either.

“He laughed, John. He laughed at me so hard that he bled out faster. Told me I can’t ever undo what he did to me.”

Some of Jacob’s blood is still spattered on her boot, on the sleeve of her jacket, rusty brown flecks of someone’s life decorating her like dull jewels.

“Do you understand?” There’s a whisper of a plea in her voice and she hates it. “Do you understand why I did it? Why I had to do it?”

He doesn’t answer, and she gives him plenty time to do so before she sighs into the mouthpiece.

“See you around, John.”

Then she hurls the radio from the edge of the cliff, sets it spinning through the crisp mountain air, autumn sun glinting off the casing, and she doesn’t hear the impact of its fall.

Maybe there isn’t one.

* * *

She dreams. 

She dreams of blood and screams.

She dreams of the moon falling from the sky, leaving white-faced destruction in its wake. Leaving the oceans without a tide. Tsunamis here and empty sea beds there. Whale carcasses and flopping fish.

When she wakes she vomits next to her campfire. 

* * *

She buries herself in the Henbane, even though she hates it here. But Faith is next on her list, and she needs to be close, needs to reach out for and find a _ real _ Faith, a _ solid _ Faith. Not apparitions.

Apparitions can’t bleed. She needs Faith to _ bleed_.

But all she gets is fairy-dust and unsteady movements of air. Hallucinations and siren songs and whispers. She shoots wolves that turn into deer, moose that turn into turkeys. She thinks that she can see her own image in the river, but the water is Bliss.

And she will stop and sit by the river’s edge, the sound of rushing water turning into music in her ears. Faith’s song; is she a river horse? Her mind will leap like a flat smooth stone across the surface, several times, leaving fading rings in its wake. No permanence, nothing real. She forgets the crisp cold air, can’t see the frost refracting light, as she tries to follow the sound of the water back to Faith.

But she can’t.

Eventually she heads for the 8-Bit. She craves microwaved pizza and watery beer and normalcy. She needs _ company_. Normal company. 

But as she sits there she realises that she is someone else now. She looks into the smiling face of Nick, such everyday man, such uncomplicated goodness, such salt of the earth. She travels along the stern lines of Grace’s cheeks and lips and nose, the seriousness gleaming in her dark eyes, and she realises that she’s separate from them now. Apart. Perhaps she was never really with them, as much as she’s been trying to help them become free. 

And she knows then that she can’t touch normalcy any longer. It’s not for her.

_ She’s _ not normal.

Not anymore.

Joseph’s silence is hurting her ears. Faith isn’t bleeding but her own eardrums are.

* * *

She dreams again. 

She dreams that the stars are blinking out above her, one after one, leaving the world in darkness. Then they come falling down, burn through the atmosphere, crash through the bedrock. Leave incurable fissures through Earth. Fissures that breaks it into pieces and sends it hurtling through space. Just another meteor belt, just another shower of falling stars, seen by someone else from a different planet, light years from here.

Sometime in the future. 

Dead birds are falling too. So many little bodies; like snowflakes, no, like _ ash_, sticking to her hair. A jumble of beaks and dull eyes and feathers.

Craters and pulverised mountains and itty bitty body parts, all around her.

No blood, and she _ longs _ for blood, longs for colour against all the ashen grey.

Everything is silent around her, everything is dead.

Not a sound.

There is only her.

* * *

She drives down to the Spread Eagle, disregarding that she shouldn’t really be anywhere near Holland Valley and John. 

Because...because if watery beer won’t do it then maybe hard liquor will.

She sits right by the jukebox so the country music can drown out her thoughts. She looks at everyone through her bourbon glass, and their faces are warped and bent like in funhouse mirrors, and she thinks that soon they will all be dead.

She doesn’t know why she thinks that.

She leaves again. 

* * *

Finally she can’t stand it anymore, can’t stand his silence. Can’t stand the _ wait_. 

Because it _ is _ a wait. Joseph will not let her go unanswered and unpunished forever, he will come for her eventually, but the wait is crippling her, felling her.

She can’t walk on her knees any longer. 

At the end of the day she can only blow up so much property and snuff so many lives as a time-kill while she anticipates his move. She swims in alcohol and hallucinations and everything is becoming ever more morally questionable and she isn’t sure where her sanity ends and his madness begins.

So she sets out for his compound one evening. Before leaving she checks with one of the drunkards leaning on the bar in the Spread Eagle. 

It’s definitely Sunday. 

There’s frost on the ground, and she enjoys how it crunches under her feet, but fears the sound will betray her. As fleet of foot as she is, she can’t avoid breaking crystals and bodies. 

The moon is new, and the night is clear. She catches herself stealing glances up at the sky, reassuring herself over and over and over that the stars remain in their given places. That they’re not falling down around her like white hot confetti.

It’s not easy approaching a guarded and fortified island unseen and unheard, even in darkness. A sound strategic choice for the location of Joseph’s home, one she imagines sprung from Jacob’s mind. And she snuffed that, his mind, pinched it between her finger and thumb like a candle flame. It was damaged and full of holes, but of course he ensured hers would be too. A little gift. A delighted _ fuck you _ to his murderer. 

She shakes her head and continues on. It’s not good to think.

Entirely by chance she comes across the torched helicopter that brought her to Hope County and failed to bring her out. She runs her hands across the twisted metal, draws the faint smells of fuel and burnt leather seats through her nose. Pulls it deep into her lungs and tries to imagine where she would be now if this awkward metal bird had managed to fly her away from here. 

But she can’t. She can’t imagine it. 

She can barely remember the name of her hometown.

Eventually she approaches the compound, the white buildings covered in ugly scrawls and the campfires and the frozen mud. Back again, and this time she comes voluntarily.

Well. In a way.

She identifies his cabin by instinct and memory, climbs in through an open window. His bathroom. Simple, spartan. One bar of soap, no mirror.

She steps out into the main living area and finds it empty of him. As she thought then - he’s at his church. She lights one candle in the window and waits. Peruses the many books on his shelf. Religion and philosophy and...comics. Her lips quirk into not quite a smile as she runs her fingertips across the thin spines of several Spider-Man comics. But she thinks that she doesn’t want to see this. She doesn’t want evidence of a softer side of him, a human side. 

It...it doesn’t work in her head. It tangles up in everything she doesn’t already know and makes it _ worse_.

As she stands there looking at the sad little fragments of his sad childhood the door opens behind her and she hears his footfalls. 

She _ knows _ they’re his.

She turns around. 

He stops a couple steps into the room, and looks at her where she stands, back straight, chin raised. She won’t cower. She’s done nothing wrong. Behind him John walks into the cabin too and closes the door.

Ah. She hadn’t quite counted on _ his _ presence.

John says nothing though. Hangs back and watches them with flashfire eyes as Joseph stalks forward with two long steps, pushes her back into the shelf and kisses her like he means violence. Like he wants to _ smite _ her.

And she responds, groans low in her throat and tries to touch him or push him away but he won’t let her, he grabs both of her hands in one of his and crushes them into the books behind her. Like he’s hoping to press some of the religion and belief there through the thin skin on her wrists and straight into her veins. Make her understand the madness in his head. Bring her to heel. 

She looks past his shoulder, sees John coming closer, _ too _ close, until she could maybe touch him if Joseph would release her and allow her to reach out. So near she can almost feel his breath on her cheek, his warmth against her side. Then she feels his hands on her. Sliding slowly over her hips and legs, slipping inside her shirt, into holsters and pockets.

Taking all her weapons, her gun and her knives.

Joseph ignores his brother’s nearness, pushes harder into her and bites her bottom lip hard.

“Why did you do it?”

He murmurs the question straight into her mouth, places the rage and venom of it on her tongue and forces her to swallow it all down. Then he takes a small half step back, pushing his aviators on top of his head and she can’t avoid his eyes. It’s impossible.

She thought she had seen him angry. Oh, she knew _ nothing_.

“You martyred my brother. I wanted him alive. Wanted him to walk through the gates of our New Eden and find the peace and happiness so long denied him. Why? Why did you kill him?”

She’s surprised he hasn’t hurt her yet, that he hasn’t broken her bones and torn through her skin and emptied her of blood. The rage in his eyes alone ought to be enough to burn her alive. Turn her into a flaming torch for his insanity.

Fuck him. 

“Because I wanted to prove to myself that I’m not your puppet. And I wanted to prove it to _ you _ . I wanted you to _ see _ that I’m not under your control, that outside of….whatever the fuck is going on with us, I’m still my own. I’m not _ yours_. I’ve got _ agency.” _

Big words for someone currently held still and trapped by him, but she doesn’t care.

“So you killed my brother,” he murmurs, “to prove a point.”

“Yes,” she hisses, and she can feel control slipping, can feel her fingers curl into claws in his grasp. Her teeth snaps at him like she’s nothing but an animal. “And I’d do it again.”

He leans forward. His breath is hot on her brow, eyelids and temple as his lips find the shell of her ear. His whisper travels through her ear canal and straight into her brain, wraps itself around the stem.

“I will unmake you for this, then remake you full of grace and light.” His releases her hands, grabs at her shoulders. As her arms fall back down one hand brushes against John’s coat. “This is my fault too. I should have reined you in sooner, kept you on a shorter leash.” His voice turns to a growl. “_Much _ shorter.”

The terror is bitter and acrid. She grasps at John’s coat, holds the leather cuff between her fingers and tries to steady herself, her breathing, her heart.

“He put something in my head, something that isn’t me. Something alien. A...a tumour. And he _ controlled _ it, Joseph.”

She wants to vomit around the pleading note in her voice, wants to spit out on his shoes. The glass shards in her throat too.

“But it’s still there. Even though he’s dead. I can’t get it out.”

John is strangely quiet. Perhaps he knows something of being unmade and then put back together wrong, too. Perhaps that is what is preventing him from stepping forward and strangling the life out of her, even though she sees rage and sorrow at war in every line of his body, in his bared teeth. She’s still holding on to his coat sleeve. He’s letting her.

She leans her head back, laughs. 

“So I guess the joke’s on me, huh? Again.”

John speaks for the first time. 

“You might fight it, but you will walk in Eden with us. We’ll drag you through the gates kicking and screaming if we have to. Joseph has seen it. You will be blessed.”

She laughs again. Then realises that she’s not laughing anymore, she’s crying.

_”Blessed _ ? You know, I can’t decide which one of you believe himself more of a _ god_.”

She hiccups, wipes her nose on her sleeve, nods at John. 

“Is it you? The way you play with people, the way you spin lives like threads around your fingers. Pull them tauter and tauter until... maybe they snap, maybe they don’t. How skilful you are, balancing blood and pain and the life force of so many people. Tell me something, John.” She’s sobbing now, loud and gasping. “The ones that don’t make it, the ones that don’t breathe through your cleansings and confessions and atonements...do you believe you turn them into angels? Do you think that you cleanse them in death? Purify them?”

His eyes are dark and staring off to the left, and it’s not rage that darkens them, she realises, it’s delectable reminiscence. He glories in his memories, treasures them. Wraps them in tissue paper and elaborate bows and take them out to enjoy every now and then. 

Then he looks straight back at her.

“Like you made Jacob angelic?”

She recoils from her own accusation fired straight back at her, and remembers Joseph again when his hand clutches her hip. He’s still so close, she could kiss the crown on his chest through his shirt. She tips her head back to meet his terrible eyes instead. 

“And you...you’ve put something inside me too, just as Jacob did, and I can’t get it out! I can’t get you out. I can’t stop _dreaming_ and…”

“Yes,” he interrupts, and there is triumph in his voice, “I did put something inside of you.” He kisses her forehead, then strokes his hand across her belly, makes sure their eye contact is absolute. 

“And this child,” he begins, and she can feel that helpless freefall again, the nausea and her hair whipping about her face as she tumbles downwards.

“What do you...what are you…”

“If it’s a boy, he will be called Jacob.”

Then he abruptly steps away from her, heads for the door, opens it and walks out of the cabin. Back to the church.

She slides onto the floor, meets the magma of John’s gaze and wonders how she could be so fucking _ stupid_.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter turned out more overwrought and bleak than I had gunned for and I suspect that is because I am currently playing Death Stranding. God, it’s so beautiful. And one of the songs on the OST, BBs Theme...it breaks my heart every time I hear it. Expect an angsty fic inspired by that song soon. It fucking kills me.
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7Zra9-6DvQ


	5. Chapter 5

* * *

**Chapter 5**

* * *

John remains with her in the cabin.

She stays on the floor while he saunters across the room and takes a seat in the same chair Joseph had sat in while spanking her. The memory warms her face, an alien feeling, and she averts her eyes. Looks towards the one window in the main room.

It’s started snowing. She can see snowflakes fall in and out of the flickering light from the campfires dotted about the compound, gusts of winds taking them into wild whirls and swoops. Making them dance.

“Fuck,” she whispers quietly to herself, but John both hears her and understands her meaning well enough. He smiles slightly, but rage is still putting a shimmer like oil in his eyes as he follows her line of vision out the window.

“Ever experienced a Montana winter?” 

“No.” 

“Of course you haven’t. You’re not from here, are you.” 

It’s not a question, and he carries on without waiting for an answer, voice distant as he travels backwards on memories.

“It won’t stop between now and at least March. Feet of snow, Deputy, harsh winds and crippling temperatures. The roads and mountain passes out of here, they were hard enough in winters gone, and now, _ well… _”

He raises a brow at her and she understands. She gets it. This is not a normal winter. The cult blew tunnels and blocked roads, cut cables and tore down radio masts during the Reaping, effectively isolating Hope County from the rest of the world. If getting in and out was hard previous winters, then now...now she’s _ fucked._

Unless she can get out of here right now, find a way to escape before the snow settles too deep.

He follows the tumble of her thoughts as nimbly as always.

“Don’t even think about it. You wouldn’t get far.”

His voice is even, the threat as sleek and curved as a raptor’s beak. Her fingers curl into claws on her knees.

“Sure.”

Idly he plays with one of her knives, her favourite, spins it on the table top like a bottle. 

_ Truth or dare? _she thinks nonsensically, her thoughts skittish even as her body wants to be heavy and still, sink into the floor. 

She’s so exhausted. 

“Do you believe him? What he...what he said about me?”

She can’t bring herself to speak out loud Joseph’s parting shot. Dressing it in words from her own mouth would lend too much credence to lunacy, would paint it in starker colours than Joseph’s yellow and blue hues.

John is serious as he slides his eyes across her form, hovering meaningfully on her flat abdomen. She pulls her knees closer to her chest, hides herself.

“I told you before, didn’t I, that Joseph is never wrong.”

She disregards his answer, deems the whole thing as insane as any of Joseph’s doomsday ramblings.

Speaking of...

“Do you really believe him about the Collapse?”

His voice comes low and sure and immediate. No time for thought, not even a second’s hesitation.

“...Ever. He’s not wrong _ ever_. Yes, I believe him. Irrevocably.”

He leans back in the chair, makes himself comfortable on the rigid wood, long legs stretched out in front of him. She’s freezing on the floor. 

“What has he ever done to warrant such blind devotion? Such unquestioning belief? Fucking _ adoration_?”

“You tell me, little Deputy. Did he not bend you to his will as easy as snapping his fingers?” He smiles as his cruel words dance on the air between them, but there is something dark and hot and angry in his eyes.

Her cheeks burn red, self loathing bitter on her tongue. There is nothing to deny though; she confessed to him, did she not, down there in his bunker. He knows very well the thrall she’s held in by his brother. How weak she is.

A stupid thing, she decides, this game of spin the bottle but with a knife that he doesn’t even know they’re playing.

“I don’t want to talk anymore.” She sounds petulant, even to her own ears.

He shrugs.

“You started it,” and he’s voice is deliberately childish, juvenile, ever so slightly lilted by sing-song. He’s mocking her, and were he anyone else but the man keeping her under guard she might laugh.

She returns her attention to the snowflakes out the window. Fat and cold and deadly and so beautiful. Slow and hypnotic except when they’re not, when they go wild on competing gusts of wind, thrown higgedly piggedly about out there. Jubilating in the herald of a season that will keep her trapped.

_ Fuck_.

Her back is ramrod straight against the wall, her eyes wide in the flickering dusk of the cabin.

“You know I won’t allow you to leave so you might as well rest.”

She flips him a lazy bird but allows her lines to relax, soften, curl in on herself a little. She’s helped along by the knife he’s keeping ever in motion, the sound of wood and metal singing a lullaby to her restless mind. She doesn’t sleep but she hovers somewhere just outside the walls of oblivion. An uneasy borderland, but she’s grown used to it, has pitched a tent in it, since her arrival in Hope County. 

It's pleasant to float a little.

* * *

She’s still on the floor when Joseph returns. He brings a flurry of snow inside with him, brings bitter cold. She stirs, starts, watches through heavy lids how he and John stand with their heads close together, framed by the open door. Hears low murmurs, pieces of words and sentences, soft, soothing baritones. Then John’s back disappearing out into the white night, door closing behind him. 

Joseph crouches down in front of her, gathers her up and lifts her as if she is made of nothing but air and starlight. He holds her to his chest as one would a child as he walks across the floor towards the bed.

He smells of fire and snow at the same time, and she can’t make sense of the conflicting information and signals, can’t make heads nor tails of the way his will wraps itself about her like a veil of gossamer and steel.

“How do you do this?” she asks, drowsy, tongue loosened by the confusion between wakefulness and sleep. “I should strangle you. Kill you. Claw your eyes out.”

“Do you think less of yourself for not attempting any of that?”

“Yes,” she says, and such _ honesty _ in the midnight hour.

He puts her down on top of the bed, gently, and strokes her cheek with the back of his knuckles.

“Well, don’t. I doubt you’d succeed, even if you were to give it your all. Relax instead. Sink into this. I’ve been thinking about having you in my bed. In softness and comfort.”

One thing needs to be spoken before all else though. She catches his eyes and clearly enunciates the words.

“I don’t believe you.”

She could mean many things, of course, but he understands her just fine. Slides his hands to her belly and smiles.

“You will soon enough. You will see.”

Then he travels outwards, slides his fingers along her contours, barely there, up into her hair, pulls the tie off her braid and spreads it down across her back. Sifts it between his fingers and leans forward to press a dry kiss between her eyes.

He pushes her back down on the bed, spreads her out before him posed in the passive way of a Renaissance angel. Undresses her as if her clothes are of silks and velvet and cobwebs, not denim and plaid.

There is something like a forgotten, archaic reverence in the way he touches her, but with an air of condescension. The way one might in passing admire the colours and gilded details of an old idol from a dead religion, the details of a broken goddess statue in a crumbled temple.

Sincere, perhaps, but not true.

She thinks that despite his pious facade he might be incapable of worship, because he wants it all for himself. That he feasts on it, thrives on the supplication of his flock, this man who erected an enormous statue in his own likeness, who has believers killing in his name. This man who gouges out eyes and stands with raised arms and blood dripping from his elbows.

And he demands that same worship from her.

But that...at least _ that _ she can withhold from him.

She can. She _ can_.

Even when he discovers parts of her with fingers and tongue that she never knew could roil and flare with touch. When he drags his beard along the inside of her wrists and down her neck, when he writes on the soft skin of her belly with his mouth. When he pulls the beads of his rosary between her lips, one after one. 

Even when he has her keening for him, _ begging _ for him.

Even then.

“I spent this evening praying for the strength to forgive you,” he whispers as he enters her, and places a strong hand at the base of her throat.

Her snort at his implicit threat is barely audible, but he hears her and gives a punishing, hard thrust. She digs her nails into his tattooed shoulder blades in retaliation, and he speeds up, snaps his narrow hips like he’s trying to break the cradle of her thighs. 

“Did you pray to yourself?” she asks, and ah, there it is. How she clings to it, the deep core of her, so hot as to ignite nuclear fusion. The gravitational essence he can never quite reach and gouge out, no matter how deeply he penetrates, no matter how easily he bends her to his will. 

He chuckles.

“How I enjoy your spirit, little one.”

Then he speeds up, grabs the headboard with one hand for leverage and throws himself forward, carves out his very own space inside her. No one can go there but him. Somehow he reaches further this way, deeper even than when he had her bent over his table.

His other hand holds her chin, forcing her to look at him, not ever allowing her to turn away. His eyes are terrifying, and she’s wide open to them, to him.

When he has her like this he becomes the entire world. She thinks that is part of the secret of his power.

She screams out her temporary surrender, then hates herself for it while learning how to breathe again.

“You are mine,” he whispers in her ear, arms wrapped around her, pressed so close to her that she expects mirror imprints of his scars on her skin.

“I am a tool to you.”

“A tool I could grow exceedingly fond of.”

“I think I hate you.”

“Go to sleep. You are exhausted. I can feel how tired your bones are.”

She drifts off, helplessly falls into deep sleep. It’s rapture. It’s hell.

* * *

He takes her again just before dawn. Guides one of her legs up against her chest and slides into her from behind.

It’s so quiet, that peculiar, beautiful silence that only happens during snowfall, and the otherworldly whiteness too, seeping through the window and burnishing the cabin in a cold silver. He moves slowly inside her, his hands stroking along her dips and shaded bones with a sort of lazy devotion, his lips kissing her neck and her ear. 

She’s barely awake, but she still burns with him.

* * *

True dawn sees her out of his bed. His cabin is freezing, but she stands naked and looking out the window, arms wrapped around herself.

“Beautiful, isn’t it? I always take the time to enjoy that view. It won’t be around for much longer.”

She ignores his doomsday talk, keeps looking out at the snow covered mountains and the icy lake even as he comes up behind her, presses his naked front to her back, rests his chin on her head. Warms her up.

“I was counting guards, actually.”

“Plotting your escape?”

“The view might be great, but the cage is shitty.”

“Well, your cage will change. Something a tad more gilded.”

He strokes her shoulders even as she tenses up against him.

“You genuinely will not let me leave this time?”

“No.”

His voice is stone gates grinding to a close and she spins around, snarled hair whipping around her shoulders, so as dark as her mood, her fear.

“No. No way. You told me it was my choice whether to do this the easy way or the hard.”

“I did,” he agrees, “but now I’m changing the parameters. I’m doing damage control by locking the damage _ up_. You would kill innumerable people if left to run wild with your _ pride _ and your _ wrath_. I’ve seen it, and I can’t allow it. And you, you proved it yourself.”

His smile grows chilling, and she remembers how much he is a man to be feared.

“You made your bed when you killed my brother, Deputy. Now you lie in it. I’ll join you there as often as I can.”

He turns, arrogantly gives her his naked back. She looks around, but all her weapons are gone. 

“John will be along soon, before the snow gets too deep, to take you down to his ranch.” He pulls on his jeans, a shirt, then turns to face her again. “You will remain until we all have to take refuge underground. Your comfort will be greater there.”

“You mean it’s easier to keep me under lock and key there.”

“That too, Deputy.”

He raises a brow.

“Now, as beautiful a sight as you are, you should get dressed. Company is imminent. The way you look now is for my eyes. Only mine.”

She dresses quickly, the jeans and shirt she came in, her heavy coat. She wishes she had hats and gloves, sturdier boots, but she will have to make do for now. She casts her eyes around the cabin for something she might swipe and make use of as a weapon, but comes up empty.

They’re not leaving anything to chance.

John shows up, just a quick knock on the door before he steps inside. There’s snow in his hair and beard, on his shoulders. He walks right up to them, so close that all three of them are sharing warmth. At the last second she stops herself from reaching for his coat sleeve again. Clenches her fists by her sides instead.

The corner of John’s eyes crinkles just so, and she knows that he caught her repressing the childish urge. He doesn’t mention it though. But she knows he’s stored it away; ever more ammunition, little shiny pieces of power.

“It’s getting deep. We’ve got people out with ploughs but I want to get moving soon regardless.”

“The Deputy is ready,” Joseph says, finality and flinty authority in his voice. He grasps her arm and holds it out to John. Some sort of fucked up, gleeful handover and she seethes at the unworthiness of it all. But there is no point kicking off right now. She would not stand a chance up here, unarmed and alone in the very heart of Joseph’s little kingdom. On the way to Holland Valley, on the other hand…

As ever, John runs his tattooed fingers along her thoughts, separates them and exposes them to the light as easily as he cuts into skin.

“Take your coat off and leave it here.”

“What? No! Are you…”

“It’s freezing out there,” he interrupts, “and I suspect you’ll be much less inclined to attempt a daring escape out of the truck if you’d die of exposure not long after. So. Coat off.”

It’s Joseph who slides the coat from her shoulder, and brushes her hair to the side and kisses her bared neck as he does so.

“Be a good girl for me now, Deputy.”

Her rage, not ever anywhere but just below the surface, raise up so fast there seems to be sparks of static flashing between her fingertips, in her hair.

“_Fuck _ you, Joseph.”

He just smiles at her, then turns and leaves the cabin, no doubt heading back to his wretched church. She picks up one of his books and hurls it after him as hard as she can, but John steps forward and pulls at her arm at the last second, warps her aim. The book hits the door frame right next to Joseph’s head, but he doesn’t react, doesn’t turn around. Just keeps walking away.

She turns to John.

“He’s crazy,” she tells him, and she doesn’t know why she is pleading with him, trying to reason with him. In his own way he’s as insane as his older brother, and more cruel and unpredictable to boot.

John’s look is almost pitying, and she wants to claw his eyes out for the insult. She allowed herself to be snared. She is not to be pitied.

“I _ will _ escape,” she tells him as they drive down, two cultists hovering over her from the backseat. Bliss bullets engraved with her initials in their raised guns. The road is windy and narrow, and he drives too fast, one hand on the steering wheel, the other draped across her seat. His eyes are on her more than the road. Relaxed. Cocksure. 

“I sincerely doubt it,” he answers. Then: “He’s only looking to protect you.”

“Do you believe that yourself?”

He shrugs.

“Joseph never has only _ one _ reason for something. I would’ve thought you’d learnt something about that by now.”

They are down in the valley now, and she squints up towards the mountainside.

“I can’t make out your stupid sign against all the snow. Bet you didn’t think of that when you had it constructed.”

“I grew up in Atlanta,” he says dryly, by way of answer, and she can’t hold back a broken giggle. The stutter of air from her mouth splashes condensation against the frozen truck window, and she draws in it with a cold finger. Absent swirls and shapes, looking like mountain peaks and birds above them.

They arrive.

She is walked inside with a jaunty entourage of armed guards, and she spins around in the massive main room. Admires all the possible escape routes (big French doors. Skylights) rather than the enormous fireplace and the expensive woodwork, and he realises of course, pulls her along by her elbow.

“Your room, Deputy.”

It’s on the second floor, small, with no windows, but not uncomfortable. She doesn’t think anything could be uncomfortable in this place of his, ostentatious and preening and dripping with cash and dead animals. 

The door looks sturdy, solid oak, and...

“This… this locks on the outside.”

“Remarkable powers of observation and deduction. Is that why you decided to join the police force?”

He makes to leave with that mockery, but she can’t bear being alone just yet, trapped in a small room with no natural light, with her hair and her skin smelling of Joseph.

She longs to see the snow again.

“John…Why is he really keeping me here, and not at the compound?”

He stops in the doorway, leans against the frame. Drags his fingers through his hair, pats his pockets. Looking for cigarettes, she thinks. Further down the hall she sees a guard standing sentry. Between the mezzanine railings she sees two more down on the ground floor.

“Better fortified and guarded. Closer proximity to my bunker, which is the one he intends to ride out the Collapse in.” He grins widely, and it almost reaches his eyes. It certainly shows all his teeth. “Sturdier place too. Harder for you to gnaw your way through the walls or dig your way out with a spoon or whatever dashing means of escape you’ve no doubt cooked up in that busy little head of yours.”

“I hate you all.”

“If that makes you feel better,” he says with a shrug. "Sleep tight, little murderess."

Then he closes the door in her face.

She hears the lock turn. 

It’s sounds like cold laughter and chains.

* * *

  
  
  
  



	6. Chapter 6

* * *

** Chapter 6**

* * *

  
  
She’s not allowed any socks. Or shoes. 

She’s not really surprised. 

It’s what _ she’d _do if she would ever hold anyone captive in the bleak midwinter.

She is only let out of her room _ (it’s not a room it’s a fucking _ cell_) _when John is back and barely then, and it doesn’t take long for little niggly weaknesses to crackelate across her will. A little fissure that starts somewhere near the corner of her eye and travels downward over her cheekbone, towards her jawline and across her throat. Down over her breasts. Spreads across the entirety of her, turning her into a mosaic, a figure from an ancient mural. 

She can feel them, the little cracks, but she can’t see them in a mirror. They are there though, she swears on it as she breathes in staccato through her claustrophobia, fights against roiling nausea. 

Because she dreams still. Every night. Dreams about the end of the world. The ash, the pumice. Tsunamis of lava and water and stone. Tideless seas, flattened cities, terrifying yellow light.

Perhaps her cracks make her like one of the plaster casts from buried Pompeii, a victim to its very own end of times. Perhaps like the girl in the frescoes in the Villa dei Misteri, covered in petrified lava.

But it’s the dreams about the skies emptying that shakes her the most, has her trashing, with cold sweat enveloping her like a sweater. Stars falling like fiery streaks behind her eyelids, the homeless moon bouncing between the bones in her skull, and her own whimpers waking her up. Because she has never before realised how much she clings to the sky above. Relies on its infinity to...to somehow keep her _ contained_. Whether overcast. Lit by stars and galaxies and satellites. Wide open and blue. Thunderous. Sunny.

And now she can only see it out of the windows when he’s at home. Expensive glass between her and endlessness.

But at least when he is at home she may walk freely around the main part of the house, because it has been carefully swept for anything she may use as a weapon and because guards are ever in her peripheral; ugly, hulking shadows. Inside and outside, and weaving the tree lines are grey streaks with sharp canines. Judge wolves. 

She pads barefoot across his wooden floors and his animal pelts and the cold tiles in the kitchen. Around and around the rooms, with nothing to occupy herself with but ever more preposterous escape plans. Memorising guard rotas. Cataloguing locks. Daydreaming about running while watching the snow settle heavy on the trees outside, her back resolutely turned on the portrait of Joseph and the Eden’s Gate banners hanging from the rafters. 

When John’s home he’s often in the kitchen, sitting by the granite island with coffee and papers spread about him. Inventories, deliveries. Confessions. That sleek, black haired _ reaper_, she thinks, as she sits opposite him toying with her own coffee cup. 

As if she needs more nervous energy.

For someone who gravitates towards the kitchen he’s an atrocious cook, eating only for sustenance and not for pleasure, leaving her quietly aghast. Because she remembers enjoying food, taking delight in cooking and eating. _ Before_. Before Hope County. Before dinner was a tin of cold beans in the front seat of a truck, and breakfast a slice of old pizza on the run, or just _ air_.

But she won’t cook for them. Even though she denies herself something pleasurable and _ good_, even though her fingers twitch with the need to measure and weigh and sift, hold the reassuring weight of potatoes and onions and carrots. Shell peas. Pick herbs. Pinch carefully selected spices.

She _ won’t_. It would be too domestic, cast her in a role she’s unwilling to play. It would normalise the situation, and there is nothing normal about this.

She’s a captive. 

“It’s been so many weeks,” she says, “and I’m going quite insane.”

He doesn’t look up from his papers.

“It’s been _ two _ weeks, and you had better get used to it.”

But she can’t, and she fidgets where she sits and considers her loss of time. Twirls the long hair she’s no longer bothering to braid, just about resists the urge to chew on it. Her nails aren’t quite so lucky. She looks around her, at the careful lighting, the copper pans, all the smooth oak.

“How come Joseph lives in what amounts to a shack while you live in a fucking one percent Aspen chalet?”

“Personal choice,” he shrugs, offhand, not interested. “Very soon we’ll all be underground for seven years, surviving on bare necessities and recycled air. I see no reason to deprive myself before then. In any way.”

He rests his eyes on her for a few seconds then, and she can feel the weight and heft of them on her neck, on her wrists. Then on her fingers, as she spins her coffee cup faster and faster on the counter. He seems to dislike her ticks, maybe because they might feed into his own. They are both live wires, white fire just underneath their skin.

“You know, you need to find yourself something acceptable to do before you land on something _ un_acceptable_, _ making _ me _ do something I might regret. There are plenty books. Read. Or cook something. Don’t think I don’t know you want to.”

She doesn’t deny it because there’s no point.

“Bit hard when the sharpest object in this kitchen is a wooden spoon.”

“You’re a creative creature, I’ve seen evidence of that first hand. You’ll think of something.”

He keeps going, and how she abhors it, this _ need _ of his to have his mind be in restless motion even when he’s sitting still. 

“And enough of the coffee. There’s ginger tea in one of the cupboards.”

She digs her nails into the palm of her hand, hard.

“I hate it when you know me.”

“I know you do,” he says, and his eyes are wild with unfettered delight, “but I guess you’ll just have to learn to live with it.”

She leaves the kitchen to find a book, and it isn’t just nausea making her feel faint and bloodless.

Joseph might have her writhing against his magnetism, but John can read her like an inventory list of grains or sins.

* * *

He’s standing outside on the patio, smoking, and she on the inside, right up against the French doors. Her fingers pressed to the frosty glass. Envying him, even though his fresh air is mixed with nicotine as he draws it into his lungs. She’s watching how his smoke mix with his frozen breath into perfect rings. They float upwards, made pretty by the patio lights. Their eyes meeting in between, his never letting go of hers.

It’s dark, and so quiet. Soundless. Soft. She wants to be out there.

Even if it’s with him.

And then a thin green line emerges behind him, she can see it past his shoulder. Snowflakes are falling through it, washing it out, but it’s unmistakable still. Travelling. _ Seeking_. 

_ Grace_, she thinks.

She moves to warn him, body jerking infinitesimally. But with an enormous effort she leashes her instincts. Why should she? They’re not on the same side. They are enemies.

But the look on her face seems to be enough for him, her wide eyes, and he dives without hesitation, drops to the ground and rolls. 

The shot goes through the glass right next to her face instead. Shatters it into a million tiny pieces, embeds into her cheeks, settles in her hair. Little crystals, becoming the snowflakes she’d wished to feel melting on her tongue.

Only these draw blood.

Then he throws himself through the door, and sound returns to her at the same time as he hits her at waist level, takes her down on the floor with him. He lies on her, looking down at her face, and she listens to glass shattering, wood breaking. Alarms blaring. Shouting. Running.

She can’t breathe. He’s rigid on top of her, body hard and poised, but his face almost serene. Some of the snowflakes from his hair falls down onto her face, bringing her the piece of the outdoors she had craved. He’s so close she can feel his breath soothe her stinging cheeks. 

“Your compatriots, I believe. Do you think they’ve come _ for _ you, or _ despite _ you?”

She looks him straight in the eyes.

“It doesn’t matter. I should be out there with them.”

His answering grin is savage.

“But you aren’t.”

Then he’s on his feet, and he pulls her up with him, and he doesn’t let go of her wrist. With his free hand he draws his gun, cocks it. All around them is chaos, and his eyes shine bright with it. His men are converging from all directions, machine guns and bombs and nail studded bats. She hears running on the roof above, on the wrap-around balcony outside. Explosions not at all far away. Firefights. Acrid smoke.

Then the first Resistance member comes through the doors, followed immediately by others, and it’s bullets and fire and adrenaline, almost comforting in its familiarity. It’s what she’s grown used since she came here, to Hope County, it’s nothing strange. It’s her normal now. Of course, she would usually be an active participant, often the aggressor. Not as she is now, tethered declawed to one of the men she has dedicated all her time here to oppose.

“Are you using me as a shield?”

He looks at her briefly before returning his attention to the attackers. His voice is light and full of mockery.

“Why, I would _ never_. I’m _ protecting _ you, Deputy.”

She wants to hiss _ bullshit! _at him, but she can’t deny that rather than having her in front of him he’s placed her slightly behind, his body angled inward. Casually he raises his revolver and aims through the line of his men, shoots someone but she can’t see whom, she only hears the thud as a body hits his expensive floor.

She hopes whoever it is leaves a stain.

Then she sees hair with the shine of a raven wing out of the corner of her eye, and she spins.

Hudson.

John sees her too, and laughs, genuine and horrifically contagious, right in the midst of carnage. He pulls her closer to his side, his arm shackling her waist, his mouth to her ear. Bullets soaring over both of their heads.

“I do believe they’ve come to _ save _ you, Deputy. Fools. When will they realise that you are already saved?”

His beard is scratching the delicate shell of her ear, his breath is scorching. 

“Best you retire to your room and leave me to deal with these heathens.” He grabs her chin, brings his face impossibly closer to hers. She makes to knee him in the groin but he blocks her almost as an aside. “Stay obedient for me now, or Deputy Hudson will end up with a bullet right between her eyes. I’ll see to it myself.”

She looks around for something that she might use take him down with, but can’t see anything. She can’t _ get _ to anything, as wholly held and contained as she is by him. He signals to his men and she is grabbed by both her arms and dragged backwards, towards the stairs. Away from that faint touch of freedom, she can almost feel it regretfully stroking her cheek in parting.

The shouts grow louder, bodies are falling down, and she wonders if anyone realises or knows or finds _ anything _ in this pandemonium. John doesn’t seem to care, and she sees him join the fray as she is being more or less carried up the steps. She wants to scream, wail, but even now her pride forbids it.

She always did have the most fucked up of priorities.

Up on the mezzanine she scrabbles against the railing, clings to it and dig her heels in. Looks down, trying to get an idea of where the fight is going before she is locked away. But she finds that she is unable to get a sense, unable to separate out bodies from faces from blood.

Because all she can see is John, and the way he _ kills_. 

She can’t stop _ looking_.

How he carries himself in a fight...She had made the mistake of thinking of him as someone who fights battles using his mind, his intellect. His corrupted intelligence. She’d thought of him as someone happy to hurt people and put himself out only with his victims strapped to chairs, helpless and at his awful mercy.

She doesn’t think so anymore.

Because she sees him vicious and deadly and oh so fast. He has abandoned his gun and drawn two knives, and they are flashing like extensions of his hands. He cuts a brutal path through the melee, spins and twists, his own little dance. Unafraid. Uncaring. He seem in possession of a near supernatural instinct for weak spots, and she sees him slashing through Achilles’ tendons and femoral arteries and jugulars. More than once she catches glints of white teeth.

He’s _ smiling_. He’s having _ fun_.

He enjoys killing this way just as much as the other.

He glances upwards then, returns her look, smiles wider, all teeth and dancing eyes. He leaves the fight to his men, bounds up the stairs towards her. When he’s level with her she sees how dilated his pupils are, bloodlust and adrenaline tumbling out of his eyes.

“I thought I asked you to take the Deputy to her room?” he demands of her assigned guards, his voice soft and treacherous. Then he turns his attention entirely to her, wipes the blade of one his knives on his jeans before sheathing it. “If you want something done you just have to do it yourself, isn’t that right?” and his fingers are back around her wrist, tugging her along with him down the upstairs hallway. “Get back down there and finish this,” he orders over his shoulder, and she hears how the men hurry back down the stairs again. 

John pulls her to the door of her room and opens it, pushes her inside and follows. He slams the door shut behind them, and she turns and looks him up and down. He’s still holding one knife, and he’s covered in blood spatter. Automatically she catalogues it, remembers from long ago forensics classes.

Arterial, she thinks, of an abstract pattern on his left cheek. Cast-off, she decides about spatter decorating left arm and shoulder and a patch of his neck. She thinks he would go supernova if sprayed with Luminol. Old blood, new blood, lighting him up like a freshly dead star.

“You could tell them to join us, and save their lives.”

He says it as if in jest, light and with the lilt of laughter to the edges of his words.

They both know her.

“Never,” she says, fierce and stubborn and oh so fucking stupid, because she can hear them dying through the oaken door even now.

He shrugs and makes to leave, then stops and throws a supposedly off-hand question over his shoulder, only it doesn’t land with a thud on the floor; it floats from him to her.

“Why didn’t you kill me?” He still hasn’t turned around, but he holds her gaze over his shoulder in a way that shouldn’t ever be fair. “Back at the bunker. You came to kill me. I gave you plenty opportunities to try. You didn’t take them. Then you left.”

_ And killed Jacob instead, _he refuses to say, but it’s there, behind his words and his silence, and oh how she hopes that the peculiar sharp metal she can taste on the air between them is his survivor guilt.

“I don’t know. I should have.” And she’s honest, because she doesn’t know, and she’s honest, because she really _ really _ should have.

Their eyes hold on, cling to each other’s skin and bone structure and lips, and he moves towards her again, away from the door. He follows her bloody footprints back to her, she’s not noticed until now but her bare feet are torn to shreds from crushed glass.

_ Transfer stains, _her mind shrilly supplies.

“Would you let me touch you?”

Such echoes, how the sound waves bounce around her where she stands. Joseph had once asked her the same thing.

“He says I’m his.”

She doesn’t know why she speaks it out loud, why it matters what Joseph says and believes. _ If _ it matters.

“Oh?”

Then he leans forward, takes her wrist again, and his beard scratches across her face, along the thin, fragile skin of her eyelids, down, down, and he finds her mouth and swallows down her gasp like a communion.

She lets him. And it’s different from Joseph, the madness is of a different flavour. He tastes like smoke on her tongue, burning trees, a ravenous forest fire, everything red hot and out of control and manic. And he tastes of blood. He kisses her like he wants to eat her, eat her lips and her tongue and her brain and all her thoughts and secrets and confessions. But while he forces her body to bend and fit deep into his own... their footing is still even. 

Equal. 

This is a...a proclamation of independence. Another assertion of free will.

_Kill Jacob. Kiss John. _How _funny_ self assertion looks from where she stands.

The desperation. 

She breaks away from his mouth.

“Why the fuck did you do that?”

Her voice is calm though, quiet and steady. She runs two fingers along swollen lips, can feel her blood rushing, making them plump and red.

He shrugs, and he looks feral, and he looks torn between fucking her and killing her. She pulls against his grip, and it only makes him hold her harder, so hard she thinks he might grind her ulna and radius into a fine powder.

“Perhaps I just wanted to taste the lips of my brother’s murderer. And you? Why did you let me?”

“Perhaps I just want to fuck with Joseph.”

He moves in again, and she meets him, dives headfirst into him. Swims in him, frenzied strokes, nose just barely above water.

He’s got a hand on her left breast by the time she pulls away, his nails in her heart, and she hears gunshots and shouting and dying through the walls still.

He hears it too.

“You best go to sleep now, little Deputy. I’ll go back down and clean up the rest of the filth. I’ll see you again in the morning.”

She laughs and then shies away at the sound. So brittle it might rent the air in two. When she speaks it’s with a changed subject, her thoughts skipping strangely, jumping hopscotch outside all of the lines.

“I grew up wanting real love. Someone to be with, a...I don’t know, a fucking soulmate. Romance and real love and happiness in the simple, in the mundane. None of this is _ that_. None of it.”

“No,” he agrees as he lazily wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand, “it’s not.”

Then he leaves and locks the door behind him.

* * *

When she wakes from another dream about dying stars Joseph is next to her in bed.

That he’s now so deep under her skin that she hadn’t even woken up when he arrived, when he slid under the covers with her and insinuated an arm under her neck...she almost gags on the way it exposes her, leaves her without a stitch.

But worse than all of that is the way she’d curled into him in sleep, her nose pressed into his throat… She’s irrationally convinced that she’s been inhaling his madness that way, drawn it deep inside herself, had it merge with the little rough-edged, loose pieces inside her head.

He notices how she stiffens, the way her breath goes from deep to a stutter to shallow little dips and boughs.

“You’re awake. John radioed, about what happened last night.” He strokes his hand along her side, calloused, soothing, riling, “and I came to make sure you’re fine. That you are unharmed.”

She’d fallen asleep only when the noises from downstairs and outside stopped, when everything grew quiet apart from murmurs and the occasional chuckle. It was not difficult to guess which way the Resistance attack had gone. She’s exhausted and scared and lost, but she’d rather bite off her tongue than tell him.

“I’m fine,” she mutters, and tries to pull away from him, but he won’t allow it, curls his arm tighter about her, draws her closer into him. She relents, because doesn’t she always with him, and pulls him deeper into her lungs, ah, and there's that delirium, there’s that _ fall_. He drags his fingers along her jaw, combs them through her snarled hair, as she breathes him inside of her, again and again, and she hates herself for all the breaths she takes, soaked as they are with delusion and violent delight.

He shifts himself closer still, rolls himself on top of her, and his weight is safe and soothing but abhorrent too. He seems to carry the seasons and weathers around with him. As hot as he runs, right now he smells of pines and snow. Cold winds. He envelopes her like a winter forest, laden and heavy.

“You’re locking me away and now I only get to experience the outdoors when you show up.”

_ Or maybe with John_, she doesn’t think, because a small part of her fears that perhaps he can read her mind.

She doesn’t understand how he is so smooth and so thorny, how she can slide helplessly along him at the same time as she cuts herself on all his sharp edges. She doesn’t _ understand_.

He chuckles, and it’s dark, that chuckle, and deep and gilded and torn.

“I’m your keeper, Deputy. And you must get yourself used to being kept.”

“I can’t ever get used to that. First chance I’ll get, I’ll run. You know I will.”

He takes her face in both of his hands, kisses her forehead, her eyes, her lips. His rosary falls across her throat, heavy, little beads collecting in the notch at the base.

“You, you move faster than light. Faster than the light from all of the stars up there. Than the star inside of _you_. But you’ll never get away from me. Believe that.”

She believes.

She doesn't care.

  
  
  
  
  
  



	7. Chapter 7

* * *

**Chapter 7**

* * *

Joseph leaves again, and it feels as though his lingering touch ought to have branded her skin. The swirls and grooves of his fingerprints right on top of her cracks; a treasure hunter, a grave robber disturbing the old secrets of her. But she can’t see those prints in the mirror, just as she can’t see her cracks. She can feel them though, his fingers, and she can’t tell if they are trying to widen her fault lines or soothe them.

Probably both at the same time, as always with him.

And she tries to wrap her head around missing him while at the same time feeling relieved that he’s not here with her.

But she can’t. 

...As always with him.

The windows gets fixed, the furniture put right or replaced, and no one will tell her who lived and who died. And it’s not like she can divine it from those darkened spots on the wooden floor where the blood isn’t quite scrubbed out. It’s a pity the stains don’t come with faces or names, she thinks. 

John spends more time at home now. He’s _ closer_, even though he doesn’t kiss her again. She almost doesn’t care, because him being around means she’s out of her windowless room. She can regain some semblance of time, she knows when it is day and when it is night. 

The time of day doesn’t seem to matter to him, though, he seems a prowling night animal, at his most content and awake and productive when it's dark outside. She finds that even though she knows again of sunrise and sundown she still upends her day and is awake with him at night. She will circle around the room he sits working in, often the kitchen, and she will try sitting still but it doesn’t work. She will fidget and fret and look and look and _ look _ for a way out, a solution, because there must be one. She refuses to accept that this is it now, that there is nothing more to do.

No, an opening will come, and when it does, she will be ready to grasp it in both hands and run.

In the meantime she paces and she watches him. And the circles she walks grow smaller and smaller, because right now he’s the black hole at the centre of a very tiny galaxy, and it’s getting harder to fight gravity, resist the pull.

“Stop it,” he tells her. “You’re like a bird flying against a window, over and over again. You’ll break your neck.”

“I can’t help it.”

He throws down the ledger he’s working with, hard, and she twitches because she knows of his temper, but she’s pleased too.

_ A child_, she thinks, _ I’m behaving like a neglected child desperate for attention. _

And any attention is good attention, even if it’s negative. Even if it’s angry, maybe violent.

Actually, right now she’d welcome violence. Her fingers ache and itch with a need for it. But he’s too clever these days to indulge her; time has passed since he urged her to go forth and become Wrath. Lots of blood in the water flowing under the bridge.

“I can’t have you constantly fluttering and starting in the corner of my eye. Do something with yourself, or I’ll keep you in your room.”

She sits down opposite him, fingers twining twining _ twining _ away at her hair. She suspects she is looking really quite mad, a Bertha Mason locked in the attic, but she can’t stop. 

“How is this my normal?” she asks him. “How have you made it so, you and your brother? This is the 21st century, and I am a captive. I’ve been forcibly deprived of my freedom, held here against my will, and...and I’m _ settling into it_.”

“To be fair,” he drawls, “you were a menace when allowed freedom. You _ killed my brother.” _

The last words are spat out, an ugly growl, anger like a signal flare in his eyes. She stands again, resumes her pacing. Deems it unwise to remain stationary in his vicinity when he’s this angry. But she can’t let it go, this subject; the topic of her incarceration, the issue of this entire fucked up situation in Hope County.

“It was you or him, John. Show some fucking gratitude.” Before he can answer she hurries on, the words falling unchecked out of her mouth, a tinge of lunacy, a frisson of mania.

_ Be like the company you keep, _she thinks and tries not to laugh like a deranged woman.

“I should be fighting this more. I should be trying to gouge your eyes out at every turn, stab your back, rather than letting you…_ wanting _ you to...”

She bites off her words as she realises that he’s giving her his full attention now. There is satisfaction and victory and glee in his eyes, and something else, something...

“Human beings are incredibly resilient.” He stands, walks towards her, and she stills and waits for him. “They will do whatever it takes to survive, to go on, protect themselves mentally and physically.”

He reaches her, because she won’t back away, and he steps forward, into her. Touches her, strokes his seven sins along her cheekbone and up her temple.

“That’s what you’re doing. You’re adapting. You’re _ surviving_. You’re doing _ what you have to do.” _

His hand leaves her face, slides down her neck and into her shirt. Gently and meticulously he scratches a nail along the tattoo he gave her. Every letter. Slowly. When he drags it down the last line of the ‘h’ he comes perilously close to her nipple, and she trembles. 

His voice goes so deep, such impossible nuances and vibrations.

“Don’t lose track of who you are, though. Stay yourself. Don’t forget.”

She leans forward, rests the side of her face against his chest as he finishes speaking his piece. His skin is warm. His heart beat steady.

“But, it is what it is, Deputy. Don’t fight against it. It will do you no good. Rather, it would harm you. Learn to flow with it. Learn to _ lean_.”

She wants to scoff, but can’t.

Oh, he’s _ good_.

* * *

So she gives in and starts cooking, even though she is limited in what she can do without any sharp implements. She needs to do something with her hands, now when she can no longer squeeze triggers, throw grenades, stroke her fingers along knives. 

And she slides so easily back into old familiarity, into hollow echoes of an old life. If she closes her eyes as she stirs the pots and pans, as she checks for seasoning, brings the wooden spoon from pot to mouth…she could almost convince herself she’s back home.

Whatever home is.

These days the one way she can recall it is through smell. Olfactory memories, not visual or auditory, and most certainly not touch. Touch belongs to Joseph now. And, she thinks, maybe to John.

So she closes her eyes and inhales instead. The sharpness of pepper, the soft, long gone meadow tales of dried herbs. Thyme and sage and basil. The smell of soil and clean greenery about conserved tomatoes, the mellow richness of melted cheese.

She tries not to dwell on where the produce she’s using comes from, even though she lives in the home of the reaper. She focuses only on smells, and she hums softly, and she hopes he can’t hear her where he sits across the kitchen with his lists and his ledgers and his restless force.

The food hardly gets eaten though. She’s got no appetite to speak of, only picks and nibbles through it all. And John, John still barely eats, so indifferent to food.

Other things sustain him, she supposes, he gets his nourishment elsewhere. His ardent, bullheaded belief in his brother’s words, for one. And from confessions and atonements - almost every day he comes home and unlocks her room and stands before her soaked in river water, drenched in blood. Lazy smiles and blown eyes. Unapologetic, wanting her to see what she can’t prevent.

“Do you want to know something terrifying?” she asks him one evening as they sit in front of the fireplace, then continue straight on, because _ of course _ he wants to know. He’s her inquisitor, her confessor, after all. “I’m forgetting things about _ before_. Before I came to Hope County. I’m forgetting the names of old friends. The city where I used to live, it’s just merging into nondescript grey buildings and nameless neighbourhood. I can’t remember my favourite restaurant. I’m not sure where I used to buy my milk. The other night...the other night I thought of my mom, and for a moment I couldn’t remember if she’s alive still, or if she is dead.”

She leans closer towards him. Needs some solidness, even if she has to take it from him. 

“Is this Stockholm Syndrome?”

“I don’t know,” he shrugs. “Maybe.”

“I’d have thought you’d be something of an expert on the subject.”

One corner of his mouth curls upwards under the beard.

“You’re not one of our typical...ah, guests.”

She looks straight through the fire, sees the snow ever falling through the windows beyond it, and she enjoys the contrast. Her voice is soft and full of accusation as she goes on.

“You’ve… all of you, you’ve _ erased _ me.”

He turns entirely towards her, one leg up on the sofa, an arm along the headrest. He looks enraptured, full of wild emotions. Lips parted, light eyes going dark.

“You’ve made me into some else. Like I’m of soft fucking clay, and four pairs of fingerprints all over me. But the others...the others put things inside me, or just plain fucked with my neurons,” she lets her head fall back, and she thinks that perhaps she can feel his fingers in her hair, “and you only wrote on my skin.”

She can see how his pulse throbs on the side of his neck, how his heart rushes at how she’s been unmade, all that black blood singing.

“I don’t deal in mind rapine.” 

Just good old fashioned brute force coupled with an extraordinarily dark empathy.

But neither of them say that.

“It might be your one redeeming grace,” she tells him seriously, and he laughs until he chokes on it, and then he strokes her cheek and neck too hard, and then he takes her to her room, says goodnight and locks her inside. She leans her face against the door, and through the thick wood hears his retreating footsteps. 

She wants to go with him.

* * *

It becomes undeniable.

Irrefutable.

Time moves and whirls with the falling snowflakes out there, with the quiet in here, and she’s finally forced to take note of her body. Actually listen to it beyond stemming blood and tending slash wounds and linking up her bruises into constellations.

The creeping fatigue, even though she’s doing nothing strenuous. Her tender breasts. The absence of her monthly bleed for...well, _ months _ now. 

She stands in John’s grand main room, and she runs her hands over herself, rushes headlong along contours that doesn’t seem to belong to her any longer. Sharper there, rounder here. A new topography, changed...changed by.... 

She suddenly and unexpectedly vomit on the floor, helpless to stop it or find a toilet or a bucket in time. 

John raises his eyebrows infinitesimally where he studies his vomit spattered, expensive boots. He’d seen the look on her face and made across the floor towards her, but reached her not quite in time.

“Oh fuck off,” she gasps before he can say anything, “like you haven’t already ruined them with all that river wading you do. And as if you haven’t seen worse, down that dungeon of yours.” She wipes her mouth, rubs at the tears collecting at the corner of her eyes. She wants the dizziness to go away, she wants the taste of vomit off her tongue, she wants to sleep.

But first... 

“Joseph. Get him to come here. I need to talk to him. _ Now_.”

It’s a struggle not to turn that last word into a scream. She suspects that if she starts she won’t be able to stop, she would screech like a harpy, wail like a banshee until all the fucking windows in this place cracks and shatters. 

_ Perhaps a way to escape_, she thinks and notes her own hysteria. She needs to calm down. She needs to breathe and keep a clear head.

She needs to get out of here.

John takes one look at her and actually complies, goes off to radio Joseph with a wryly amused look on his face and darkness like pitch in his eyes. When he comes back a short while later she’s on the sofa with her head between her knees, more to hide her tears from him than to control the waves of dizziness. 

“He’s on his way.” He sits down next to her, and she hears smugness and something like lament in his voice when he speaks next. “I told you he’s never wrong.”

“Go to hell,” she says tonelessly, staring down at her own bare feet, grateful that he isn’t touching her. She couldn’t stand it right now.

They sit in silence for a while, she can’t tell for how long. Her idea of time still needs to be relearnt beyond night and day. She no longer have a sense of seconds and minutes and hours, and maybe she’ll never regain it. Maybe she doesn’t care.

Suddenly she sees light out of the corner of her eyes and turns to the windows, realises its a slim crescent moon hanging precariously just over the top of the pines. 

It’s finally stopped snowing. The sky is clear.

She sits upright, turn to John, and thinks that for this she will _ beg_.

“Please can I go out on the balcony. It’s a clear night. Please. You can come with me out there to watch me. I just...I need _ air_. Real air.”

He’s quiet for a long beat, studies her intently, like he’s trying to read the desire for mutiny and escape in her face. Divine truth and secrets from the fine lines around her eyes as if they are hieroglyphs, like there are ancient runes on her forehead and drawn deep in her eyes.

“John…”

“Fine,” he rasps. “Five minutes. There’ll be guards all about, you know that. Don’t try anything clever, little Deputy.”

He takes her by the elbow and leads her up the stairs and onto the mezzanine, then he opens the door out to the balcony proper. He executes a grand, mocking bow and waves her outside, a sarcastic tilt to brows and mouth. 

She gives him the finger and goes, followed out into the evening by his low laughter.

He himself hangs back, stays inside and shuts the door behind her, and she hates herself for her gratitude. Most likely it’s because he knows she won’t be long and wouldn’t get far if she tried running, barefoot in the freezing winter as she is. 

She steps up to the balcony railing and holds on to it hard, trying to stop thinking about how her bare feet are going numb, how she is wearing only old jeans and a worn shirt and the chill is penetrating straight through. Because, for the first time since the night she voluntarily went to Joseph’s compound she is able to draw deep gasps of clean air. She’s outside. She can smell snow and frozen sap, smoke and a faint, false promise of freedom. She pulls it all into her lungs, and she refuses to cry again, because her tears would freeze to ice on her cheeks anyway.

She keeps her gaze level though, looks straight ahead. She finds that now, when she’s finally clean under the sky once more, no obstacles between, she can’t raise her eyes and look. She realises that she’s scared of finding it empty of stars, scared of seeing holes where the stars should be.

She looks steadily towards the trees instead, and she breathes.

Then she looks down onto the ground just below, her instincts somehow still sharp and keen despite her time as a captive.

Joseph is standing there, looking up at her, his face just barely lit by the crescent moon and the lights above the front door; it’s mostly shadows, his face. But she sees enough.

He smiles when their eyes meet, and that smile hold ancient truths, sadness, and _ revel _ too.

She wonders how her heart can beat so strangely and still beat at all.

* * *

She’s inside and downstairs moving faster than the icy Montana wind, so furious she’s able to ignore the vicious pain in her feet as they warm back up. She skids to a stop as he walks through the doorway, and she’s faintly aware of John trailing behind her.

“You motherfucker. You did this.” Her voice carries clear across the room. 

He lets the crudeness slide. He’s too busy being victorious to take her to task for name calling. 

“I did. The purposes are many. A couple won’t be revealed to you just yet. But for now this will keep you in place and out of mischief.”

He closes the heavy double doors behind him, and looks past her at John.

“Leave us, please.”

She looks over her shoulder, meets John’s eyes but stays silent. Nothing she could say would hold any sway regardless. She turns back to Joseph again, hears John move away through the kitchen to the rooms beyond, doors closing behind him. They are ostensibly alone now, though she sees the dark silhouettes of guards outside every single window. There are more of them than normal, he must have brought men down from the compound with him. She wonders whether it’s to protect him from her, or to ensure that she stays put.

The latter. She knows he’s perfectly capable of overpowering her on his own, he’s proven it time and time again.

He speaks then, seemingly tired of her reticence after that first hurled insult. He’s a very patient man, she reflects, but she seems able to chip away at that. Tiny little fragments coming away from him with each meeting, metal shavings falling to the ground.

“You wanted to see me, Deputy.”

She nods, and stays where she is. She fears what would happen if she gets too close, she knows his hold over her. 

That bastard.

“Do I dance prettily,” she asks, “as your marionette?”

He smiles. 

“Ah,” he says, “but you told me you weren’t. You told me that you are your own, that you are a free agent, that I can’t rule over you.”

She clenches her fists as he softly taunts her, throws her reasons for killing Jacob back at her.

“You’re doing everything in your power to prove me wrong, aren’t you?”

He sighs and closes the distance between them then, walks up to her without hesitation and without a care. He puts his hand on her chest, slides home surely, intimately, like he’s got a map of her painted inside his eyelids.

“Give in. Yield. So many ghosts living in your heart, yet you persist with your anger and stubbornness.”

“In _ my _ heart? _ Your _ heart must be a cemetery by those measures.”

“It might if I allowed it. But I don’t.”

He takes both her hands in his, brings them up to his mouth and breathes warm air on them, easily penetrates the chill in her bones. She tries to pull them back, but he won’t let her.

“Despite what you might think I am not enjoying the element of...coercion in our relationship. I’d rather you’d choose to stay with me of your own free will. But I don’t have much choice. Your place _ is _ with me. I told you of the multitude of possible futures that I can see. All those possibilities _ end _with you and me. There is no question. It’s how we get there I am trying to control.”

There’s a mirror hanging in an alcove under the stairs, and he brings her over to it, hands hard and unforgiving around hers, accepting no resistance, and she thinks that his words just now were a lie.

He does enjoy it.

The mirror is a gilded, baroque monstrosity, nothing like the austere one with warped glass hanging in his home. But the situation is the same, with him behind her, holding her firmly still. Long fingers about her chin, making her look.

She looks the same as before, but so different. That timeless sepia face of hers remain, but the girlish roundness of her cheeks is gone, replaced by dusky shadows. Her wide, fine mouth harder, her eyes deeper, a little bit of madness delicately etched by the corners. Her skin paler, much paler. She can’t see the cracks she knows are there though, she can’t see the fingerprints. 

She can just feel them.

“You know, I saw you outside just now. I _ saw _ you. Those wild eyes of your lit so prettily by the porch lights. And do you know, during all my time here I don’t think I’ve ever seen the stars burn more brightly, or look more beautiful. Yet you didn’t spare them a second glance. Why is that?”

Like this, his burning eyes holding hers trapped in the glass, she must be truthful, there is no choice. She curses his power over her.

“I keep dreaming that they will all burn out. Fall from the sky. Everything dies.”

He looks delighted, and he looks sad.

”Those aren’t dreams. You know, I believe you’ll be brought around quicker than you think. I believe you already _ see_.”

“I think you’re wrong.”

He chuckles darkly, and her skin comes alive with it, the sound burning cells and nerves alive.

“Tell me, do they scream, the stars, do they scream inside your head?”

She tries pulling away, but he holds her even harder, draws her back into him, she feels him in her spine. And there’s that ozone again, there’s that thunderstorm. All so familiar, if not safe.

“You know that it’s madness, not true. You’re mad, and maybe I am too. Maybe you’re contagious, maybe you’ve infected me.”

He nuzzles her temple, her hair; a strangely tender thing to do. 

It doesn’t suit him.

“Ah Deputy, what is madness other than dreaming the truth while awake?” He grows serious, the slightness of jest leaving his eyes. ”No one should know that better than me.”

He looks at her again, but at her body, not her face. He rests his chin on her crown, touches her, and in the mirror she sees what his hands feel.

Her larger breasts, tense and swollen and sensitive. A new shape to her, unfamiliar proportions. A gentle hint of a swell to her previously flat stomach. She doesn’t understand how she could’ve blinded herself for so long. 

It’s pretty fucking obvious now when she’s having her nose harshly rubbed in the truth. 

Joseph keeps running his hands along her, splays his fingers over her stomach, and she studies his face now rather than her own.

There’s a certain softness about him in this moment, a mellowing of the fervour in his eyes, in the line of his upper lip; a small, peculiar step removed from the omnipotent prophet that perhaps is his true guise. She realises suddenly that he’s happy about this new life growing inside her, that there is some joy about him, so threadbare and thin as to be almost transparent. But there, unmistakably _ there_.

It makes her want to be cruel, distance herself from all this insanity, and she brutally excavates a memory that’s been left to fester deep down. She drags it into the light, throws it to the ground in front of them both.

“Your daughter…what was her name?”

He grows so still, so cold, so remote, that for a second she feels unfiltered fear, primal and pure, crawling down from distant mountain tops. And he hurls honesty at her like he means for it to be daggers, like he wants to penetrate her, her skin, eyes, heart.

“I never named her.”

She digs her own dagger in, twists it, and thinks that it does some damage even though it’s made only of air. 

“You never…? Do you know, I have never ever thought of myself as a mother. I’ve never wanted children. But even I would name my child and not _ suffocate _ it.”

He leaves then, abruptly, just like that, the warmth of him falling away from her back and suddenly she’s so damnably cold. He doesn’t slam John’s massive doors as he goes, but it’s close. She meets her own eyes in the mirror, and she thinks she might finally have managed to anger him beyond return. That feeling on her tongue, though, it doesn’t taste like satisfaction.

It tastes like ash.

A guard comes and takes her to her room, and she’s almost grateful for the four walls, the isolation.

She stands in the middle of the floor and stares at the locked door, and she rubs the slight, new roundness of her stomach. She knows that somehow, in some fucked up way, she already cares for the little being popping like bubbles inside.

All the more reason then, to _ act_.

* * *

It’s past midnight.

She moves down the hallway, glides between shade and illumination, and takes an old, familiar delight in how she avoids the guards, their detection. This is what she is truly good at: quiet stealth and sifting shadows through her fingers, bending moonlight to her will. Invisible movement, disappearing and reappearing.

This is _ her_, and she hasn’t forgotten. She could never forget.

She reaches the door to John’s bedroom, soundlessly opens it just enough, and slips inside. Her eyes finds his bed, and she cautiously approaches it.

She can feel her own face contort for just a moment when she realises that he sleeps with a light on, when she sees how his eyes moves restlessly beneath his lids, how the sheets are twisted impossibly about his body. Not at peace, no matter what he might tell himself when awake. She wonders if he dreams of the pain he’s endured, or of the pain he’s forced others to endure.

She bends over the bed and shakes him into cognisance, her hands on his naked shoulders, and his nightmares slide through her fingers like mist as they leave him for this night.

His eyes snap open at her touch and he’s instantly alert, no loitering on the bridge between waking and sleep. He sits up and grabs her arms whip-fast, ready to incapacitate, and she knows he’ll leave his fingerprints. Less permanent, she thinks, than what he’s left on her chest.

His voice is clear and untouched by confusion as her stares at her.

“How’d you..?”

“Oh please,” she scoffs. “I’ve known how to break out of that room since the first week.” 

Break away from the property, on the other hand...that’s an entirely different matter what with the guards and the mounted guns and the judge wolves among the trees and her bare feet and lack of outdoors clothing. Nearly impossible.

Nearly.

But she doesn't tell him that.

She sits down on the bed next to him, hands clearly visible. Shows him that she’s unarmed, throws her cards down, except for the ones she keeps tightly to her chest. 

“I want you to hold me,” she tells him, voice plain and bare, if thin. “Just hold me.”

She doesn’t know why he does it, why he agrees. Maybe to manipulate her, snare her even more, trap her and fuck with her head.

Maybe just because he wants to.

After looking at her, her face and well past her face, he lifts the cover and invites her in, and she fits herself to his side about as easily as she and he kills. She presses her face to his chest again, feels his scars with her cheek and, for a second or two, with her lips.

Blessedly he says nothing, and they float together for a little while, their breaths aligning then unaligning again.

“Are you mine?” he asks just before sleep, voice drowsy.

Like this, at this hour, so _ close_, she must give him something like honesty.

“How can I be, when he got to me first?”

He doesn’t answer, but slides his hand up along her, rests it on her heartbeats and falls asleep, his breath moving the little curls on her temples.

She feels so warm and safe and snug. She won’t cry.

* * *

Just before dawn she escapes.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was such a motherfucker to write and I don't even know anymore, wheeeee! *crawls inside bottle of Rioja and stays until January*
> 
> I will no doubt come back and edit some of the hundreds of mistakes that I'm sure are littering this chapter, but for now I just need to publish it before I burn it instead.


	8. Chapter 8

* * *

**Chapter 8**

* * *

She runs headlong into the dark.

She turns around only once. When standing in among the trees before beginning the steep descent down towards the river, she looks back at John’s ranch. Takes in the pools of light surrounded by night. 

Warmth. Safety. A beacon, a lullaby.

But it’s false, that security, that _ song_; the feeling weaved into her being by force and by trickery.

She wraps his coat tighter around herself, burrows deep into the leather collar, then turns around and leaves, navigates by the white of the snow.

She doesn’t look back, and she doesn’t look up.

* * *

Dawn sees her wandering a winter wonderland with breathless, sundered intent.

She’s walking on the river as if it were a road, ice lit a shy, frigid pink by morning light that isn’t yet quite there. It’s just a promise, soon to be snuffed, swallowed alive by lead. 

She can smell the silence and violence of approaching snowfall.

Cottonwoods and willows petrified by frost line the riverbanks, their branches, laden as they are with icicles, bending and bowing to the frozen surface, leaving it clear of snow. The forest is deep to either side, and the mountain peaks over and beyond are not oppressive, not right now, painted in pastel hues as they are. It’s quiet, so incredibly quiet. Too early, and too cold, for animals to stir, and the snow blanket all other sounds.

Even in her state of heightened stress and terror and anger and...and _ remorse _ she is able to take in the bewitching, cold landscape. How could she not? 

She walks in a snow globe, she feels, a beautiful, terrible snow globe, and she wonders when she will hit the glass. Because she will, eventually, hit glass. And soon, the snow will begin to whirl, and she, she will be forever trapped inside.

They will have realised by now. John will be awake, and she imagines she can feel the phantom pulses of his raging under her skin, as out of control as an earthquake, a tsunami, a volcano eruption. Joseph will be notified, and he will shake and shake and _ shake _ this pretty globe of his around.

She doesn’t stand much of a chance. 

She knows that.

But she needs to try, at least _ try_, to get out. It can be done, perhaps, if she keeps going without rest. She wishes the tree branches would meet and braid together above the river, forming an enchanted tunnel for her to flee through. But they don’t, and with proper daylight she will need to move in under the protection of the trees of the forest. She can’t risk helicopters and planes, she can’t risk the Affirmation. Not with her dark hair and John’s coat against all the white. But if she can traverse the forest by day and then walk on the river through the next night too, then maybe she’s got a chance to make it out. 

Maybe.

Blood begins dripping onto the ice as she walks, red on white, hot meeting cold and steam rising up. One of the Judge wolves getting in a bite deep in her upper arm before she could slit its throat. She might need to sacrifice another sock to stem the flow. She can’t leave a blood trail.

She selects a massive boulder in the middle of the river and sits down on it. In summer she imagines water rushes and foams around it, but now the memories of motion are petrified in ice. She pulls up her sleeve and tightens the sock that she’s got wrapped around the deep puncture wounds. It’s a throbbing hurt, pulsing with her heartbeats. The wolf got her good. 

Absently she feels bad for killing the beast, but with how irreversibly Jacob had altered it, she had no choice. Not like she could ask it to heel and roll over. She’d felt twisted sympathy when she pushed the knife dig deeper into its jugular though. 

Jacob altered her too.

Even now she can feel his conditioning nestled around her brain stem, in repose, but ever ready to trigger and strike. 

She stands from the boulder, satisfied that the blood is stemmed for now. She must keep moving, can’t stay still. There were more wolves patrolling the edges of the property, but so far they haven’t caught up with her. She hasn't heard or seen them. No howls in the distance, no red crosses and amber eyes and grey fur against snow.

That’s doesn’t mean they aren’t after her, and she needs to hurry. The boots she found in John’s closet are several sizes too big of course, but she’s wearing about four pairs of his socks, not counting the ones she’s turned into make-shift bandages, and she can make do. She can walk. Run when she has to. That’s all that matters. 

She’s careful not to think of the reluctance she’d felt leaving his bed. Careful not to touch the guilt she’s feeling for the deceit. Careful to repress the guilt for feeling guilt. Careful to deny the comfort she takes in his smell even now, how she turns her face into the collar, presses her nose and mouth into the leather so that she can draw him deep inside. 

Except she can’t.

Fuck. _ Fuck_.

She’s a mess. They’ve taken her apart so irrevocably that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t ever put her back together again. And she knows that protecting the growing life inside her is only part of the reason for this mad escape straight into winter. The other reason, almost as acute and violently visceral as the child, is her terror that they’ll make her _ love _ them. 

Joseph. John. 

Both of them could, if given enough time, force love out of her. Or at least a facsimile of it. 

She can’t think of anything more terrifying.

She starts giggling, but bites the sound into pieces as quickly as it started. She can’t afford hysteria. Not now. Too loud. Too debilitating. 

It would slow her down.

The sun comes up then, almost blinding her as it shines through ice crystals and snow, ricochets light and white. She struggles up the bank, grabbing handfuls of frozen sedge grass for support. 

Time for the protection of trees.

* * *

It’s heading towards dusk again, the days so damnably short in midwinter, the nights long. 

Though at least with darkness she can move back down onto the river. A blessing really. The forest floor is uneven and treacherous under the snow, and she’s falling over more often than she cares to think about, stumbling and staggering and swearing in cut-off sobs. John’s too-long coat is dragging along the ground behind her, catching on every little thing. It’s been snowing all day, she’s freezing, and the iron in her mouth so tangible she imagines she’s chewing on rusty nails.

She’s exhausted. She’s walked since yesterday morning, running only on brief rests and handfuls of snow melting in her mouth, trickling down her throat like icy premonition. She needs to sleep. And she’s underestimated winter itself, a foolish thing to do, a _ desperate _ thing to do, though perhaps not surprising. Save a few minutes barefoot on the balcony she’d not been outside at all, captured as she’d been on the night of the first snow, kept in the warm prison of John’s home since. It’s got _ fangs, _this northern winter, such beautiful, deadly monster, and she’s woefully underdressed and unequipped to meet it. 

The wind breathes up living pillars of snow, and her hair with it, and she wonders at the picture she makes right now. A frenzied specter worn to the bone, snowflakes clinging to madness and eyelashes.

A couple of times she sees cottages in the distance, homesteads nestled in among the trees. She resists the temptation to approach, not knowing who they belong to, if it’s cult sympathisers or just regular folk. If there are any of those left alive and free in this wretched county, that is. The cottages have fairy lights twinkling around doorways and porches, and through one window she sees a Christmas tree. Tinsel and shiny red baubles and an angel on top.

Christmas, she thinks. She hadn’t realised, hadn’t thought of it, her sense of time taken from her right along with her freedom. There had been no Yuletide decorations at John’s, no stockings with the Seed sibling’s names (_minus Jacob_, she thinks and has to clamp a hand across her mouth so as to not cackle hysterically out loud) on them hanging in a neat row from the mantle. She doesn’t know if the holiday has been and gone, doesn’t know if she’s walking in a new year, or still in an old.

It doesn’t matter, she thinks. It doesn’t matter.

She slides back down onto the river. She finds herself singing for the little being inside her, stuttered and fragmented songs from her own childhood. She knows it can’t hear her. She does it anyway.

Darkness settles. The snow stops falling. The sky clears.

She doesn’t look up.

* * *

With a fresh dawn of snowfall comes capture like a mocking slap, echoing her failure all about the white landscape.

She sitting down again, melting snow on her tongue and contemplating the state of her blistered feet, when strong hands grab her from behind, hurls her forward and pushes her against the trunk of a tree. 

Ponderosa, she thinks, inhaling vanilla.

The side of her face is pressed uncomfortably into the bark and her arms are wrenched high up her back. Hard hips pushes her firmer into the pine, a beard burns her turned cheek in search of her ear.

“What will it take, Deputy? What will it take for you to finally stop fighting this, for you to _ obey_?”

“Joseph.”

There’s black mirth in the way she almost laughs his name.

She’d never entertained the notion that he would come after her himself, convinced he would send his little ragtag army out to fetch her back while he reclined on his shabby altar. But he’d come for her, and _ ambushed _ her at that. It’s with bleak satisfaction that she thinks that he doesn’t trust her not to shoot him point blank if given the chance. 

He bites her nape, a vicious, primal admonishment.

“Yes. And I don't have _ time _ for this. _ We _ don’t have time for this. The end is breathing down all of our necks and your wilfulness is of great inconvenience to me, to the Project. It ends here and now.”

He grasps her wrists in one big hand, fingers the delicate bones hard enough that she has to swallow a whine. With his free hand he reaches into the pockets of the coat and pulls out the knife she stole from underneath John’s pillow, and the gun she took from a drawer in his bedside table. She feels him tucking the weapons into the waistband of his jeans. Adding to the arsenal he is no doubt carrying himself.

When he speaks again his voice is scratchy and low, and his grip on her wrists becomes truly painful. 

“This I’ll promise you: when we are all in shelter, safe and sound, you’ll find yourself over my knee again. I intend to enjoy every second, and then some.”

She shivers, fumbles around for words and clarity. But she’s numb with exhaustion, sleep deprivation and cold, and she speaks her mind instead of sense.

“I didn’t think you would come yourself. Why did you come?”

He talks into the side of her throat as he answers, and presses his front harder into her back.

“Of course I came myself. You, and the life sleeping within you, finding you both was too important to entrust to anyone else. It could only ever be me.”

His hand slips under her clothing, and he places a freezing palm flat on the slope of her belly, making her jump. 

“I know so very deeply of loss, Deputy. Do you really think I would allow it to happen again?”

“You were the _ cause _ of that loss,” she pants into the tree. She would scream the words at him, but she hasn’t the strength. “You snuffed her out like an inconvenience. You _ did _ that.”

He spins her around and clasps her to him then, draws her so deep into his chest that she thinks he’ll suffocate her. Wraps his arms around her and hold her still against him in a jarring mockery of an embrace.

“And I won’t lose something like that again. _ Ever_. Do you understand? Do you?”

He releases her so he can look her in the face, pick out her acquiescence and hold it up to the light, but she doesn’t answer him, won’t give him that. His mouth tightens just so when she studies him right back, her neck tilted, her throat bared. And she _ sees _ it, how that one long ago deed fractured him beyond repair, and how everything that has come since are his destructive attempts at making glue.

Guilt and insanity and monstrous glamour, such wretched sorcery. It extends from him to her like a net, a spider web, and she is trapped in gossamer now and forever, she knows she is. 

Oh no. _ No_.

He’s wearing a shearling jacket with the big collar upturned, and even as she’s wanting to recoil away from him she tries to get closer, curl into him.

She’s so cold.

But just under the surface of his unflappable belief he seems almost frantic, devoid of his usual calm assurance. He’s sweating despite the cold, his glasses are askew and his hair coming loose. And his eyes flame and flare with a need for violence that she would normally associate with John. But even though he vibrates with a deep urge to hurt her, shake her until her teeth rattles, until her will come loose and then aligns itself with his, he restrains himself.

“How did you find me? Did your God tell you how?” she mocks.

He doesn’t raise to her, but she knows that he wants to. That he wants to rage at her until she submits to him and his truth. But he takes a deep breath and evens out his voice.

“The wolves. They are far more unruly since you killed their master, but they can still be reined. They still obey. Took them some time to find you, but they were unerring, untiring. Now I see why they had such difficulties.” He tears open John’s coat, and runs his hands over the clothes she’s wearing. They are John’s, she took them from the floor of his bedroom, still with some of his warmth left in them. The jeans rolled at the waist and legs to fit, silken shirt tied up. “Clever of you. However did you get hold of his clothes?”

She doesn’t know what John has told him, and how much. 

“Snuck in while he slept. He didn’t wake,” she lies, and thinks it might be from a desire to protect John rather than herself. She chooses not to look too closely at that, but how fucking _ foolish_. How lost she is. “Then I jumped from his balcony. Knew the guards wouldn’t pay too much attention to _ his _ room.”

She’d been in his bed, pressed against him for hours, wrapped around him in awful, quiet peace, and she’d escaped covered in his scent. She’d used him in more ways than one, and she’s almost as bad as he.

“How sly you are, what wily vixen. But no more. No more running, no more deceit. I’ll see to it.”

Then he kisses her and she forgets her clarity, and it’s of warfare and bullets, that kiss. Then again, he’s never been soft with her, not even when he’s tried to be gentle. It’s always been about conquering and undoing her and twisting her into a shape pleasing to his eye. Supplicant before him, a paramour crucified on his belief, his need to be worshipped and adored.

His hands go up her back under her clothes, strokes across the fluttering wings of her shoulder blades, finely shaped bone under thin skin, and would that she could take flight, up and away.

But she can’t. She realises that now. How stupid she’d been to try.

So she kisses him back, slips her tongue into his mouth and taste all of the fire and all of the sulphur in this man of a vengeful god. It’s overwhelming and hypnotic and so very, very wrong.

She still whines in protest when he lets go of her lips, bites his way down to her throat while pushing his hips hard into her, unyielding and angry. He’s so intent on leaving marks, biting and sucking and branding, that she wonders if he suspects she didn’t tell him the entire truth about John.

He puts his forehead to hers, and she screams mutely at this terrible intimacy of his, wants to pull away from it, but he won’t allow such mutiny.

“On the ground,” he rasps while pulling at his belt. “You’ll receive me on your hands and knees.” 

And he puts both hands on her shoulders and pushes her down.

There are snow in his hair, his beard, on his lips, where he stands over her in the curious twilight of a winter dawn. And ah, she thinks, here she is on her knees by his feet, and her exhaustion is doing delirious, macabre things to her mind, conjuring a terrible god before her. He smiles at having her precisely where he wants her, a triumphant smile, a burning smile, then bends down and pushes her forward, making her brace herself on her hands in the deep snow.

He sinks to his own knees behind her, and she feels how he easily drags John’s jeans down over her hips, leaving her bare and exposed to winter. He slides cold hands up her shirt, cups her breasts, brushes her nipples and tweaks them into life and agony. Then he follows the birdcage of her ribs back down, bone by bone, and soars outwards, fingertips along the sharp dip of her waist, her hip bones. He reaches her buttocks and kneads them roughly, before spreading them apart so he may have unfettered access. He bends and licks all along her, and as deep into her as he can. Readying her.

The contrast of his hot, wet tongue and the freezing cold of winter’s touch is too much, and the groan he pulls from far within her is ancient and obscene. She pushes back into his mouth, and his answering growl travels the insides of her, along her spinal column and vertebrae, lodging itself in her sinews, her cells. Removed from herself she studies the frozen clouds made by the mewls coming from her mouth.

He follows his tongue with his fingers, swipes and scissors, tests, and she can feel him hot and heavy and twitching between her buttocks. He ruts himself against and along her even as he works her cunt, his free hand finger-painting bruises onto her hip, and she will cease to exist in this vacuum between pleasure and pain, she knows it, there can be no doubt.

Satisfied now that she can take him, he lines himself up, then jolts inside all the way in one, and her cries drift upwards like wayward birds and cling to the treetops. 

He sets an impossible pace, and she’s got nothing but handfuls of snow to hold on to. He grabs her hair to keep her still, pulls her head up, and she realises there’s a pack of Judge wolves standing quietly some ways away, their crosses blood against the snow. They’re still as statues, and calmly they’re watching Joseph and her couple on the ground. She can’t stand their eyes, averts her own, and concentrates only on the feel of Joseph pushing himself in and out, how he goes deeper every time, how she can barely hold him but can’t bear for it to ever end.

He pulls her up towards him, so that they are chest to back, his arm across her jugular, her face tucked into the soft shearling of his collar, and he slams into her and into her and into her, through her, beyond her, merciless, victorious.

“No more,” he grunts, “no more running from me. You. Are. Mine.”

“I’m _ not_,” she answers, and it’s a half truth, there, burning and twisting and curdling on her tongue.

With that he grasps her chin, forces her to look heavenwards, and in between clouds fat and heavy with snow she sees the morning star and oh! They are there still, the stars, they haven’t fallen down!

“Not for long,” he whispers in her ear, bites down hard on her lobe, and she comes with a forlorn wail, splintering and skidding along the frozen air. He fucks her through it, one hand creeping up to palm her belly. Then he slams her backwards into him one final time before he spills deep inside her, quiet, his teeth making lewd indents in the shoulder of John’s coat. The marks will be in the leather forever, she thinks.

He breathes heavily into her hair for a few moments, then he pulls out and helps her stand. He tugs her sodden jeans back up for her and gives her a kiss made only of teeth. 

“There is nothing tender about your kisses,” she tells him, 

“I don’t kiss to be tender,” he says.

“I know,” and she smiles a little, and she can feel her chapped lips crack. “You kiss to win.”

He doesn’t answer, but fastens his belt again, and checks that he’s still got all of his weapons, and hers. 

_ A missed chance,_ her mind shrieks, _ what was I thinking? _and he looks at her like he can hear her thoughts. 

“Indeed.” Then he focuses on practicalities, buttoning her coat back up for her, brushing her shoulders and hair free of snow. “You took us far into wilderness, but you followed the river’s twists and turns. We’ll trek back as the crow flies, Deputy. We should be home within the day.”

“Did you let me get this far just to be cruel?”

“You got this far on your own steam.”

It’s not an answer. He however, he demands truths of his own.

“Why did you run?”

She’s got nothing but honesty to hurt him with, and she laughs in his face.

“Because you made me a captive. Because I hate you. Because I wanted to stay.”

He hums low in his throat as he studies her, tucks an errant corkscrew curl behind her ear, then strokes her cheek. It isn’t gentle.

“Well. We’re going back now, and we need to set quite the pace. I apologise. I know you must be exhausted, but we have no choice. The Voice is loud, the loudest its ever been. There’s a frightful echo in my head. Time is running out.”

He ties his rosary around her wrist, mean little knots making the leather dig into her skin, before tying the other end to his own. 

Tethered together like this he begins leading her through the woods, and she’s wondering all the while if she can ever melt the tainted alloy of him, wrought and shaped as it is by the alchemy of his belief.

As they walk she sees the Judge wolves follow alongside them.

She bares her teeth at them. There are streaks of ice on her cheeks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That sex scene wasn’t even meant to be there. Fucking Joseph, man.
> 
> Next chapter we’ve got John and his reaction to the Dep’s daring escape attempt. Spoiler: unimpressed. Jealous.


	9. Chapter 9

* * *

**  
Chapter 9**

* * *

They weave between Douglas firs and large boulders strewn haphazardly about. In summer they look like sleeping trolls covered in moss, she knows, because she remembers, she remembers the summer just gone. Now they are under snow, a roiling Narnian landscape she can’t escape.

Joseph’s path is unerring and certain through it all, he seems to know his way entirely and she never sees him consult a compass or a map. As they walk he offers her water out of a small canteen, and some protein bars. She’s not too proud to refuse them. 

But she _ is _ too proud to ask for rest.

It’s doubtful he would grant it anyway. He already struggles with her pace. Even though he won’t let himself be bound to the whims of a river and refuses to follow its serpentines; elects a faster crow’s route instead...he still burns incandescent with urgency, with some terrible knowledge that she can’t name. 

Won’t name.

He’s hard to look at right now, she thinks. Despite the snow and winter and frost he’s white hot with frantic conviction. He blinds her, he hurts her eyes, and when she closes them against the flare the outline of him shimmers against her lids.

Snow blindness, she lies to herself. Just snow blindness. 

For all his distraction he doesn’t ever let go of her, even though right now she’s so worn and so damnably docile that she couldn’t even begin to run. He seems disinclined to toy with the risk though. He knows, as she knows, that she’s only ever truly _ his _ when he’s deep inside her. The rest of the time she’s simply trapped and looking for a way out.

She scratches at her wrist, where his rosary is digging uncomfortably into her skin, pulled permanently taut by the way his long legs eats up the yards, and by the way her tired ones wants to buckle and fold. It’s already become an unbearable itch, this rosary, a hateful symbol of his dominion, his hold. 

She wonders how long before she falls.

Her wound throbs and she wishes she could somehow regain just a sliver of the Deputy that not so long ago had sauntered around Hope, cracking wise in the face of adversity. But she can’t. Her identity has become something transparent and tattered, a bad patchwork of new and old. Memories as delicate and see-through as old lace, traits floating on the winds above the mountain peaks, her will shredded and torn in the jaws of the Seed siblings. Not much left, not much left of the foundations of her, and here she walks captive. Tied to an irresistible madman with a loose circle of crudely altered wolves as a fucking honour guard.

She’s in an entirely new reality, some kind of skewed parallel universe, and she’ll never get out, will she, she’ll never get away from here. 

From him.

She stumbles over a root hidden under all the snow and goes down on a knee. It jostles her injured arm and she whimpers, a puff of agony turning into frosty air.

He crouches in front of her where she remains on one knee.

“Tell me?”

She cradles her arm.

“One of the wolves bit me. Outside John’s.”

He looks around and then tugs on the rosary, makes her stand, and brings her over to a fallen pine. He brushes snow away from the trunk, sits down and brings her closer, pulls her in between his legs. 

“Show me.”

She pulls up the sleeves of John’s coat and shirt and removes the sock, soaked through with blood now, but drying, she notes. She hisses through her teeth though, a dull pathway of pain streaking up and down her arm.

He leans forward, one proprietary hand on her hip, and studies the puncture wounds. He frowns.

“You should have said something. Before I…”

_ Took me like an animal in the snow. _She doesn’t say it out loud, but he reads her face just fine, and smiles a little.

“I don’t regret it,” he says and puts a palm against her cheek, fingers splayed. “You needed to know.” Then he returns his attention to her wound. “You did well to wrap it, protect it against the cold. And it doesn’t look like infection is about to set in. We’ll take better care of it once we’re back. For now we need to keep moving.”

He replaces the sock and pulls the coat sleeve down again. She leans into him a little bit, just a touch. So tired. And there’s that ozone of him again, curling in her nose. The thunder and lightning of summer storms, in such queer juxtaposition to the winter they walk. Her head spins and she fights the childish urge to curl up in his lap. Sleep.

“I know you are weary, Deputy.” A soothing hand glides along the bumps of her spine. She thinks this might be the first genuinely tender touch he’s given her, one devoid of agenda and coercion. She likes it far too much, arches her back like a cat to chase after it.

Then she steps back, as far away from him as the rosary allows. She still wears some of her own free will, like a useless dress of mulberry silk. How lovely, she thinks bleakly.

Joseph stands, checks their tether, his belief.

“Onwards, then.”

And the beads and knots dig into her skin as he starts walking and she follows too slowly.

The walk in silence for a while, her thoughts slipping through darkness and light like skittish animals, boundless, trapped. She can no longer bear to take in the freezing beauty around her, and she doesn’t want to contemplate her own impossible situation. Not right now. So she considers Joseph, where he walks beside her, she studies that proud and maniacal profile. The expressive mouth beneath the beard, the blue eyes given a crazed, amber tinge by those fucking stupid aviators. A prophet burning wildly, a leader scheming ruthlessly. 

And he’s comfortable out here, she realises, in these inhospitable and dangerous and achingly bewitching surroundings. At home. Unafraid and sure. She’d made the mistake of thinking of him as a man removed from action, one sending forth his heralds and his acolytes to do his bidding, spill blood and confessions and assent on his behalf. She’d thought of him as one hiding behind his flock, a craven tyrant.

The truth is somewhere in the middle, she thinks. He _ is _ a dictator, certainly, cruel and insane and so magnetic she’s helpless in the force of it, but he’s hardly a coward. 

A pity. She might have stood a better chance if he was.

He smiles a little, glances sideways at her.

“I can hear your mind freewheeling from here,” he says.

She shrugs with quite some effort.

“You seem so at home in the backcountry. The wild. At home, and _ able_. It surprises me.”

He nods slightly, as he leads her around a particularly moody fir, branches growing wildly outwards and every which way even as they hang sulkily to the ground, forced to bow under the weight of the snow. She slides frozen fingers along a branch as she passes, pushes the snow off it, watches as it springs back up with a joie de vivre she’s frankly envying.

“I learned to navigate wilderness long before we came here,” Joseph says once they’re clear of the tree. “It was _ urban _ wilderness, granted, but about as vicious. And I know Hope County, Deputy, I know it well. I’ve been here for a very long time. It’s _ mine_.”

And he believes that, she thinks, he believes himself a king. 

A _ distracted _ king, right now. Even as they walk he appears to be listening intently, head cocked, gaze faraway. 

“What’s wrong?” she finally asks him.

He shakes his head a little, and puts his hand on her lower back, urges her on. Just a little bit faster.

“Though I can of course appreciate your cleverness in electing to run into wilderness too remote and harsh for landborne vehicles, I really wish you hadn’t.”

He rubs his forehead, again looks heavenwards and inwards at the same time.

“I ought to be with my flock, preparing for the end. Because it is coming, Deputy, and it’s coming soon. It’s hurtling towards us like a great tidal wave of death. I shouldn’t be running after you, teaching you lessons that ought to be unnecessary. You really are extraordinarily vexing.”

His frustration makes her feel faintly delighted. Small victories.

“You expect me to apologize?” The edges of all her words are slurred, she notes. She will have to lean on him soon to be able to keep walking, and she can’t stand it.

“No. Too much pride and wrath on that tongue of yours, not enough humility. But I do expect you to obey me from here on out, or there’ll be consequences. Now hush, for a little while. I need to listen.”

She obeys as the wolves, ever in her periphery, whine low in their throats, seeming to pick up his worry. 

It seems Joseph has successfully made himself their new master.

* * *

They walk in silence for a couple of hours at least, by her hazy estimation. She is too burned out to make her mouth form words, and Joseph is busy listening to his delusions. His attention is not undivided though - whenever his rosary stretches taut between them he whips his head round to make sure she’s not trying something clever.

As if. It’s going towards late afternoon, dusk again, and she vaguely tries to count the hours she’s been awake but gives up. Thirty six, perhaps, and she’s surprised she’s not hallucinating yet. Even as she walks she slips in and out of consciousness, a second here, a second there; a recurring fugue state she can’t control. Her sense of place is disjointed and fluid; one second she’s in front of a massive cedar, the next she’s left it long behind. She moves like an apparition caught in static, in fretful fits and starts. And time, she loses time everywhere, sweet little beads of memories and awareness slipping between her fingers and scattering all about the woods.

She’s as weak as a newborn. 

And even if she did try something creative the wolves would have her down in the snow within seconds. They are always there, grey shadows right at the edge of her vision, streaking in and out of the darkness of the trees.

So she keeps on. There will be rest at the end of it. She needs rest. All else must wait.

Then they all emerge out from particularly dense patch of woods and Holland Valley sprawls out below them. She’s no idea of his route, but it would seem he’s kept his promise to have her back by nightfall. What crooked, unnecessary path she must have weaved following the river like she had, what an _ idiot _ she’s been.

Joseph stops, brings out a radio from an inner pocket of the shearling coat. 

“Here we are, Deputy. Just a little bit further and there’ll be passable tracks. I’ll have someone pick us up. You won’t have to walk the entire way.” 

She barely listens, she stands still next to him and she looks outwards and down. Holland Valley, and beyond. She can see most of Hope County from here. Not her home, no, she’s from far away, but something here has tugged at her since she first arrived, teased forth a corrupted sort of love. Enough of an unhealthy attachment for her to have chosen to stay and fight, and _ keep _ fighting. Wrong decision: now she can’t leave.

Such pretty snow globe. And if she closes her eyes she sees herself scratching and scrabbling against glass, so she keeps them wide open instead. Admires her prison.

The landscape is lit in freezing pink, that ethereal shade only brought forth by sharp winter dusk. Lights from homes are strewn like fireflies along mountainsides and into the dips and valleys, echoed by the stars above, burning into wakefulness one after one (_still there_, her mind whispers, _ still there_). Next to them is a huge tangle of a wild rose thicket, thorny, twisted. There are a few blooms left, darkened around the edges and frozen solid, icicles glinting on the petals. Beautiful. Everything is so darkly beautiful, she thinks, as she stands there and tries not to cry. Joseph’s voice issuing orders to his devoted is just a murmur in the background.

As she waits there her mind comes loose from her body and true night falls, pink is swallowed by darkest midnight blue. Then that changes too, because the snow on the jagged mountain peaks ahead suddenly reflect green. She tilts her head back, and she gasps, and she can’t stop _ looking_. 

Northern lights. Swooping and chasing across the heavens, oh the vivid greens; emerald and laurel and grass. Wings and rivers and roads in the sky, ever in motion, such shapeshifting wraiths.

“Oh you’ve got to be kidding me,” she sighs, so far gone now that she’s half suspecting that the eldritch wonder was summoned forth by the bastard by her side. Just to _ show _ her.

She needs to pull herself together. 

She can’t.

“A true miracle of nature and God,” he says next her, finished with his radio call, his own head tilted back to better take in the dancing lights. “I’ll miss them when the world is gone.”

She contemplates using the very last of her strength to punch him in the mouth, but decides against it. Stand quietly instead, riveted, sad.

“Come now,” he says, a hand on her elbow. “A truck is on its way. We’ve got just a short bit left to walk to meet it.”

On her way past she touches the frosty roses. 

“Are these real?”

“Of course. Why wouldn’t they be?” he asks, eyebrows raised.

“Because Faith still alive. I never killed her, even though I really wanted to. And Faith, Faith is Alice. Or The White Rabbit. She makes me see things, things that aren’t there. These…” she touches the wild flowers, “these seem like something out of a fairytale. Something Faith would conjure out of Bliss. Down the rabbit hole and out on the other side, and I don’t know what is real anymore.”

She is babbling, she realises, and takes a deep breath as she staggers sideways. She might finally have reached the outer edges of her endurance and sanity.

“Why couldn’t you just have let me go?” she slurs as he wraps his arm around her to help keep her upright. His voice is almost sad, almost _ sweet_, as he answers.

“That was only ever an option in the very beginning. I gave you an out. You refused to take it. You chose to stay and fight. As soon as you made your choice I had to make mine. I told you, didn’t I, that you would burn everything you touched if I allowed you to remain on your chosen path. So many lives, extinguished in seconds, thanks to _ you_. A thousand screaming voices in my head. I simply chose the option that would cause the least damage, and yield the most joy.”

He puts his hand on her belly, on top of John’s coat, strokes down along it.

“And now, now I’m afraid I can never let you go.”

“You are a monster,” she whispers even as she leans into him for support.

He chuckles quietly.

“All I want is to save as many people as possible. That’s _ all _ I’ve ever wanted. How can that be monstrous?”

“And the people you murder in the process of saving others?”

“And the people _ you’ve _ murdered in the process of opposing me?”

Her mind isn’t up to the task of arguing with him, and her body gave up sometime yesterday. She can only put one foot in front of another and tell herself that her mind, at least, is still mostly her own. Even as fractured as it is.

“You’ve made me lie to myself. You’ve turned me inside out, and taken me apart. You and your siblings. For delusions. Because you are hungry for power.”

He shakes his head, and he’s got the temerity to look upset.

“I believe you are labouring under the misapprehension that I am enjoying this, that I am enjoying my position and my ministrations. I’m not. I am simply doing what I must to save as many as I can, first and foremost my own flock. That’s all there is to it.”

He sighs.

“Right now you won’t thank me, as many others won’t, but you too will be saved. Trust me.”

Her question tumbles out unchecked, and she wants to tear it apart with her teeth before it slides from her tongue. But she’s not fast enough.

“Do you love me?”

His answer is just as immediate as her question was without thought

“No.” He pauses and considers, before speaking again. “You are so willful and flawed. I am fond of you, though. In time, I think you could grow fond of me too. But...”

He stops her then, moves in front of her and grasps her chin, tilts her head back so he can look her right in the eyes.

“...even now, when you’re so exhausted that you’re about collapsed in my arms, your devious mind is working away, isn’t it?” he murmurs. “You think to come back, rest and recover, regain your strength. Then you will try and escape again and again, won’t you?”

“Yes,” she says, certain.

He leans down and kisses her, just a gentle press of cold lips. His voice hardens and his face becomes sharp-angled granite as his hands come up to cup her face, forcing her shackled wrist up too, fingers wrapping awkwardly around his forearm. 

“I fear your world is about to become very small, Deputy. Reconcile yourself with that, for your own sake.”

She shakes her head.

“I can’t.”

“You have to.”

She swallows useless sobs. She’d be his queen in that small world, whenever he is feeling generous enough. The rest of the time she’d be a prisoner.

She walks. He walks.

The wraiths continue to laugh and dance and cry overhead.

* * *

She gets a few minutes sleep in the truck, sandwiched between Joseph and a guard in the back seat. She wakes with her head on Joseph’s shoulder as they drive through Fall’s End, then turn up the winding road towards John’s home.

John stands framed by the large front doors as they come up the drive. He watches Joseph help her out of the truck and he says nothing when he sees her wearing his coat while tethered by Joseph’s rosary. Nothing. But his eyes are like portholes to hell, and she can’t look away from them, she can’t.

Can’t.

Won’t.

Joseph leads her inside, and the shame she feels at the relief of being back in this familiar cage, it _ wrecks _ her.

_ Like a convict that can’t handle freedom and begs to be let back into prison, _ she thinks, hysteria shrieking in her blood, her breaths.

“Look after the Deputy for me,” Joseph says just inside the door. “I’ve matters to attend to urgently. I need to gather people up at the compound, and I need to ready Faith. There is so much to do still.” He grasps the back of John’s head, touches their foreheads together. “It’s imminent, brother. I hear it, I sense it. It could be any day, any _ hour _ now. Prepare.”

“I will,” John answers, toeing the line of subservience as always with Joseph but no one else. Joseph jerks his head towards her, and speaks as if she isn’t standing right there. 

“Don’t let her out of your sight. Not for a second. She’ll run again in the blink of an eye, even as worn down as she is. She doesn’t know what’s best for her.”

How she _ wishes _ she’s got the energy left to kick him in the shins.

He grabs her wrist and slowly unwinds the rosary, picks the knots and admires the marks left on her skin. 

“Behave,” he says to her, and then he leaves, closes the door gently behind him. John turns to her fully. Gives her his undivided attention, and she shrinks underneath the fire of him. He shakes his head at what he sees in her, then pulls his coat from her shoulders. Holds it out in front of him, looks it over. 

“You’ve ruined it, you abominable little wretch. It was my favourite.”

“Buy you a new one once the apocalypse hasn’t happened,” she mocks tiredly, and he rolls his eyes, puts a hand on her back and urges her towards the kitchen. 

“You need to eat something.”

She follows willingly because she recognises the truth in his statement. She hasn’t eaten anything but snow and a couple energy bars since the morning she escaped, and now more than ever she needs nourishment. Anything else would be selfish.

She sits numbly by his granite island as he heats up some canned soup. When he places the bowl before her she mechanically starts to eat, and when he sits himself down opposite she thinks that it’s like she was never really gone.

What a fucking waste of good energy and precious sanity.

She looks him over while she eats. His shirt is painted in blood, a grotesque Pollock on silk, and she sees more: traces on his cheeks, delicate patterns across his forehead.

Well, isn’t this familiar. 

“What have you been doing?”

He smiles with no regret, and his hair hangs down into his eyes, tousled and wild.

“I had to keep busy while you were gone.”

Ah. Channeling his rage and frustration the only way he knew how. She wonders how many bodies he managed to tally and string up during her absence. There’s an angry scratch running from on top of his cheekbone almost to the corner of his mouth, veering dangerously close to his eye. Someone hadn’t gone down easy.

_ Good_.

“Come. I’ll pour you a bath.”

He grasps her hand and pulls her out of the kitchen and up the stairs, but not to her room, no, to _ his_, from where she escaped two dawns gone. He takes her into the en-suite, opulent and garish, and she leans against the vanity and watches him. There’s a curious economy to his movements as he goes about pouring the bath and setting out towels. 

She doesn’t like it. She’s used to his badly reined volatility and exaggerated gesticulating. Him holding himself tightly sits uneasily with her, strokes her mind the wrong way, jumbles her instincts. 

“John, I…”

“You left,” he rasps. “I _ held _ you, and then you left.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, “I’m so sorry.”

And she means it, and she hates that she means it.

He cuts her entreaty out of the air as swiftly and mercilessly as he cuts sins out of people’s skin.

“Not now. I don’t want to hear it.” He looks her up and down, cocks a mocking brow in challenge. “Can I have my clothes back?”

She shrugs, and unbuttons his shirt and lets it slide from her shoulders to the floor. Pushes his jeans easily over her hips, and lets them gather by her feet as her underwear follows, then she kicks it all away. He never looks away from her, and she finds that she is entirely comfortable baring all her skin in front of him.

It should be strange, but somehow it isn’t. Her skin tightens in response to the dilation of his pupils though, and she can taste the metallic beat of her heart in the back of her throat, can hear the rushing of blood.

He slides his eyes from the sin on her chest down to her stomach, the gentle swell of it beginning somewhere underneath her swollen breasts and sloping downward. She touches both hands to the small bump, featherlight fingertips stroking above where she imagines the little being sleeps. Joseph’s damnable imprint on her, _ in _ her. A flickering, awakening life, lulled by her heartbeats. She’d been unprepared for biology, evolution, _ instinct_; how protective she’s feeling, how scared.

“Do you like children?”

Her voice is hoarse and raw, and such _ stupid _ fucking thing to ask. 

“I do. They are a gift, and should be treasured and loved. Always.”

Well, she thinks, he _ would _ think that, wouldn’t he, with his childhood crouched like a gargoyle on his shoulders. But she doesn’t want to express her thought out loud, doesn’t want to give him anything remotely resembling an excuse for the sheer monstrosity of him.

She’s pretty sure he wouldn’t accept an excuse anyway. He’s comfortable in his tarnished skin.

“I’m not even sure how far along I am,” she says instead.

He looks her over again, and she lets him, chin raised, belly framed by splayed hands, Joseph’s dried spend on the inside of her thighs. 

“I’m sure you can do the maths counting back from late summer. You’re slight, but it’s catching up with you now. Soon it’ll be unmistakable even through the unflattering rags you insist on wearing.”

It’s so real. It’s so quiet.

“Shit. Shit. _Shit_,” she chants, and he takes her hand and steadies her as she steps into the bath. The water is hot, almost too hot to bear, but she lays down in it anyway, stretches out, sinks down. Ears beneath the surface, then her eyes and mouth and nose, long hair drifting and billowing around her like seaweed. She looks up and sees an unsteady picture of him through water and blood, bent over the large tub to take her in, his hands braced on the rolltop edges. 

When she needs to breathe again she sits back up, arms wrapped around her legs, chin tucked on her knees, his presence a terrible comfort at her back. She lets him clean and patch the injury on her arm, opened and flowing again by the hot water. He’s efficient and steady even though he’s by far more used to opening wounds than healing them.

“To think it’s _ you _ I have to turn to for tenderness.” 

She murmurs it into the steam as he traces the bite marks left on her neck by Joseph. 

“Touch that isn’t a fucking victory march, that doesn’t force me to bow down.”

She swears she feels his lips on her nape, a flutter of moth wings, the scratch of a stinger.

“Can you believe how you center me right now, keep me from floating away entirely? _ You_,” she laughs, and it’s so grotesque and disgusting. “How fucking wrong is that?” 

He runs a finger down her spine then, same place as Joseph earlier in the woods, but his touch is different. He touches her like he’s trying to determine the best place to burrow in, get at her marrow, scoop it out and drink it from cupped hands.

She turns around in the bath, faces him, so serious, so fatigued.

“I feel safe and it makes me want to vomit.”

He looks rapturous and he looks sad and he looks triumphant, and he touches a finger to her lips, and he trails along the shape of his name.

“To bed,” he says, and she stands up in the bath, warm, the water running in ticklish streams down her body. She wants nothing more than to sleep. Forever.

Beyond forever.

He wraps a towel around her and she walks ahead of him into his bedroom, curls her toes into the soft pelts on the floor. He offers her a T-shirt from his closet, and she pulls it over her head as he undresses. She’s first under the covers, and he follows, and she presses her face against his chest when he wraps his arms hard around her so she can’t escape.

“You’re back.”

“I’ll try to leave again.”

His nails dig into her, a cruel, swift punishment, leaving little crescents in her flank and hip, and rumbles deep in his chest when she hisses softly in pain.

“Is it nice?” he murmurs into her hair.

“Is what nice?”

“To lie yourself to sleep? Is it nice?”

She doesn’t answer him, but burrows her nose deeper into the hollow of his throat and falls asleep right between two breaths. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It’s...kinda nice to write a slightly softer John? Weird.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the fluffiest thing I've ever written ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

* * *

**Chapter 10**

* * *

She wakes in darkness and his smell.

She’s curled on the very edge of his large bed, as if she’s poised to leap and flee even in slumber. John is a warm, ghastly anchor at her back. She might have turned away from him during sleep, but his arms are still wrapped around her, keeping her trapped, holding her safe.

She can’t separate out the snaggle of emotions inside her, they are tangled in awful knots like necklaces of silver and gold thrown carelessly into a jewellery box. Tarnished metal, highlights and lowlights and her eyes are wide open to the dark.

And there’s the faint tang of nightmares on her tongue. There are hellish tales, whispered to her in sleep, nestled in the shell of her ear. As she lies there she picks through fragments of them, little snippets of Armageddon and ash just out of reach. 

She’s glad she can’t remember. 

She looks out the window across from the bed, past the treetops, and she fastens herself to the stars. They are her friends again; she dares to meet their gaze. She believes in them once more, in their longevity and survival and light. The moon too; she cuts herself on the sharp edge of the waxing crescent and sighs in familiarity.

“I didn’t sleep for so long,” she says out to the black room.

He stirs slightly with her words, but she knows he’s been awake for a while, can tell by the beats of his heart against her back. Rapid. Aware.

“Oh, but you did,'' he answers, amusement dark in his voice. “You slept all night, and all day, and now it’s night again. About midnight.”

She considers this. No wonder she can’t remember her nightmares, evenly sprinkled as they’d been over such span of time.

“Guess the end of the world didn’t happen while I slept, then,” she says archly. She stretches, and can feel him stiffen slightly when she presses closer into him with the movement, with the taut bow of her body. His arms tighten about her for a second before he releases her and rolls onto his back.

“You are so very nonchalant, Deputy, but you won’t be for long. He’s _ right_. Soon you’ll see that he’s right.”

She too rolls onto her back, and she ignores his assertion, so used to them by now. They lie side by side, looking up into the heavy beams, just barely outlined in the different nuances of black high up there in the rafters.

“No nightlight?” she mocks, remembering the eve of her escape, how he had slept in illumination and night terrors.

“I thought you’d sleep better without,” he answers easily, doesn’t raise to her taunt, and she is left contemplating how very well she _ had _ slept by his side. Threadbare nightmares aside, her rest had been deep and unbroken, and that is really unendurable; that she should sleep so soundly while held by a monster. 

And the wrong one, at that.

She’s unsettled enough to get out of bed and pad across the floor to the large window. Her legs are shaking. While she is rested, her body is still damnably, awfully weak. She had pushed it well beyond endurance, out there in wildest winter, and it will take some time for it to recover, she knows. The wound on her arm is duller, though, the pain no longer so sharp and acute. 

Small mercies. 

Fucking minuscule.

She leans against the deep sill and looks out into the night, remembering escaping from this very window. There is even more snow now, she sees it impossibly deep on the ground, thick on the trees, and the air is cold with the clear skies. There is frost framing the window panes, ice crystals etched onto the glass, backlit by snow and stars and she loses herself in the patterns. Orphic. Archaic. The season holds her ever more in the grip of Hope County, but she can’t help loving the beauty of this winter night, so quiet and as sharp as broken glass.

Her reverie is disturbed, though, by silhouettes against the snow down on the ground.

Guards. Many. More than she’s ever seen here before. 

“Yes. Don’t even entertain the notion.”

He has come up behind her, and now he slides an arm across her chest, high enough and close enough to her throat that she knows it’s a means to cage her. She leans back against him even so, rests her head on his shoulder as if she’s done it a thousand times before and not...never. She’s wearing nothing but his t-shirt and he’s wearing only pyjama pants and...and it’s nice, those places where they touch skin on skin, it’s soothing and electrifying and terrifying all in one.

_ No_, she thinks. _ No_. She needs to get the hell away from here again. There can be no question. She needs to plan it better, be smarter next time. 

“When are we?” she asks.

“January,” he murmurs into her sleep-wild curls, and she thinks, no, she _ knows _ that he is not going into more detail as just another way to keep her; confuse and manipulate and trap her. She does the math regardless, as he had suggested, and it’s a May babe dreaming inside her, she pretty certain. May. She’s never seen Hope in that brash, voluptuous borderland between spring and summer, but she imagines it can be nothing but dazzling. Tender greens and golds and blooms, the music from freshly released rivers, boisterous and cocksure, oh and the meadowlarks, the daring winds and the blue blue blue.

She knows then, with knife-sharp certainty, that she won’t see it. She won’t. She _ knows_. 

She runs her pinkie finger along each of the seven sins on top of his hand and thinks of ways she can escape with both lives intact. 

She intends to welcome May far from here. 

She can see the hangar from the window, the air strip beyond, and if only it wasn’t covered in deep snow, making it impossible to rush down that runway and take off, fly away. 

“How come you learned to fly?”

He stays so still behind her, against her. Too still.

“Oh. _ Mommy _ and _ daddy. _ They bought me lessons. A birthday present, if I recall.” His voice is flat, dead. She understands. He had told her something of his upbringing, had he not, and she read Joseph’s awful little tome when she first came here. Those lessons probably _cost _ him. And by extension, they cost everyone crossing his path.

Idly she wonders exactly _ when _ his mind ruptured enough that the causing of pain seeped out of the fissures and emerged as the only answer for him. Maybe she’ll ask him sometime, sometime before she’s gone. 

He leaves her body then, perhaps uneasy or perhaps bored with the direction the conversation has taken. He walks over to a desk she hadn’t noticed in the shadows, and strikes a match. Lights one of those pillar candles the cult seem so very fond of, and suddenly their shared world is this little circle of light, a desk and a chair and the edges of his bed, with darkness beyond. She walks towards that light, and takes a seat in the fancy office chair as he leans against the edge of the desk. 

“I’m guessing you don’t want to sleep right now,” he says, looking down on her as she pulls her legs inside the t-shirt and curls up.

“Soon, maybe, but not this moment.” Her body is worn but her mind is busy and frantic and she needs a distraction and she needs to be centred.

He straightens up a load of paper, his ledgers and lists and manifests, and she guesses that he’s been sitting here working while she slept away the day. Taking seriously Joseph’s order not to let her out of his sight. At least that means he’s not been busy being the monster of his dungeon, splattering blood and confessions onto that stained concrete floor.

About that.

She looks up at him, his face mostly in shadows, and the tattoos on his torso and arms coming alive and moving with the flickering candle. 

“Do you know, you haven’t ever asked about _ me_. My background. My past. Where I’ve come from. Where I’m going.” She wants to be mean. “But you’re pretty fond of sharing your own story. Some _ inquisitor _ you are.”

He hums, and hooks a foot around the chair, wheels it forward so she slides in between his spread legs. He leans over her, hands on the armrests of the chair and, oh, this is familiar, she’s been here before. But the _ situation _ is different, no smell of blood and guts and primeval terror. And it’s not disgust and fear twisting her emotions, it’s...it’s something else. Something forlorn, something haunted.

“Because it’s not important,” he says, a strange intonation to his voice, so many things hiding behind. “Not any longer. You’re someone else now. _ Something _ else. You told me yourself that your past is fading, that you are forgetting. It’s becoming inconsequential.” 

He continues caging her with his entire body, and a thousand acres of forest is burning in her nose, his contours are vibrating as if she’s looking at him through searing heat. She tips her head against the backrest because breaking eye contact is not an option. He’ll tear her to pieces if she looks away.

“Have you heard of _ kintsugi_, Deputy? It’s the art of repairing a shattered vessel with gold. It takes something broken and enhances the scars, turns schisms into beauty.” His fingers sweeps gently across her forehead, and he’s close enough that his breath is warm on her brow and cheeks. She can’t move, doesn’t _ want _ to move. She wants to forget to make everything easier.

But she can’t. Won’t let herself.

She clutches her knees harder, digs her nails in.

“That’s what’s happening with you. Golden joinery. There will be these shining streaks in you, _ on _ you, binding together your fault lines, and Joseph told you, didn’t he, that he would remake you full of grace, full of _ light_.”

She breathes him in, draws him deep inside herself and feels how he is inflating her lungs, becoming oxygen in her bloodstream. 

Or maybe poison. Nightshade and mandrake.

“You’re fucking crazy. All of you. God. _ God_.”

Her words are brushing his hair across his forehead, and he smiles a little, straightens up. Moves his hands from the armrests, though he’s still holding her between his legs. Continues as though she never said anything.

“Though, personally, I’m not sure about gold for you. You were made for night light, weren’t you,” he says, “silver hues. Moonlight and starlight. It flatters you, you with your century-ago face. Sunlight is too harsh on you, brings out the sharpness and all the faults. Erases the shadows that _ makes _ you.”

He runs a finger along the hollow under her cheekbone, and she thinks that silver flatters him too. Smooths over the age of him, saturates that urge to _ hurt _ that is always in his eyes. 

She dips against his finger, and he cups the rest his hand, turns it into a bowl so she may rest her cheek in it. She closes her eyes even though she shouldn’t, comes precariously close to relaxing, drowning in that silver light he speaks of. His fingers moves up her face, strokes her temple, peculiar little patterns and far too hard, like he wants to leave his fingerprints all over her thoughts. When he speaks his voice is close to her again. 

Too close.

“You are more comfortable with me, aren’t you?” ..._than with Joseph,_ he doesn’t say. “I’ve wondered about that. I know who I am, _ what _ I am. And so do you. Yet with me, right now, you are almost...soft.”

He can’t walk away with this. Can’t ever think that he gentles her, or worse, that she gentles _him_.

“Perhaps,” she says and opens her eyes again, “but that is because I am a captive, under extreme duress, and some-fucking-how you are the lesser evil. What was that you said to me down in your little torture chamber? That psychologists would have a field day with me?” She laughs a little, just a broken whoosh of air. “Well, if they didn’t then, they sure do now.”

She unfolds her legs from underneath her shirt, stands up, means to get away from him, perhaps go back to bed or hide in the bathroom. His hands landing on her hips stops her. She starts, but his touch is barely there. It’s just a brush of a suggestion; not coercion, not force.

He’s not stopping her from leaving. _ She _ is. And so she steps closer into him, all the way, until her breasts and belly touches his tattoos and her shivers travel into his skin.

He sighs a little as his hands moves up under her t-shirt, traces small circles on the soft skin on her naked hipbones. His beard scratches her neck as his teeth clamp gently down on her pulse, tongue flicking out to taste her. His intent is unmistakable, but he’s not pushing the issue. 

He’s waiting.

Oh, aren’t they skilled at plucking on strings, these Seed brothers. 

“Why didn’t you do this last night? You could have.” There are fine little shards in her voice, catching in her throat, her oesophagus. Making her taste blood.

“I didn’t want you blaming exhaustion,” he says against her throat, “I want you to be clear, aware. I want you to do this because you _ want _ to.”

And her mind is behaving queerly once more, coming away from her, jumping hopscotch again, singing old lullabies, nursery rhymes.

_ Ring-a-round the rosie_

So she slots her mouth to his, kisses him for the second time ever. 

It’s the same as last time, only _ more_. He allows her to lead, but ensures she knows it’s a grace, a temporary boon, and she savours it. Licks deep inside him, sucks on his tongue. Bites his bottom lip and her toes curl with the noise he makes. 

He pulls at her shirt and she helps him, tugs it over her head and she’s naked before him again. Comfortable, uncaring, warm, but still goosebumps. He cups her breasts, lifts them, feel their heaviness. His brushes fingertips oh so lightly over darkened nipples, it’s barely there, a ghost of a touch, and her hips jerk against the hardness of him.

He lifts her, and her legs twines about his waist as he carries her out of the light and over to the bed.

_ A pocket full of posies_

He lays her down and she spreads arms and legs out as she waits for him to push his pyjama pants down over his hips and off. He’s as naked as her now and there are _ so _ many sharp lines to him, so many shadows and angles and the bold alignments of structure and bone. Dips and hollows and ink. Scars, but not golden.

He gets onto the bed and straddles her, is up on his knees above her, and she runs her hands along the strong muscles of his thighs, to his waist and onto his chest. She presses a palm against his heart. It beats, and it beats fast. 

Good.

He leans forward, braces himself on his hands, and take a nipple into his mouth. Uses tongue and teeth to make her arch up against him, dig her nails into his skin. He brushes fingertips into the dip of her waist and out again, traces down her hips and then draws letters in cursive on the soft skin on the inside of her thighs. 

It occurs to her that he’s trying to be gentle with her, that he is holding himself back.

“Don’t,” she bites out, the pleasure paining her. “Don’t be something you’re not. Don’t lie to me and you. Don’t you dare.”

The grin he gives her in answer is mordant, and his hair falling down his forehead paints shadows like fractured wings onto the white of his eyes.

_ Ashes! Ashes! _

He gathers her wrists into his hand, stretches her arms above her head, makes her body go taut and tense. His free hand moves to the apex of her, long fingers finding her slippery and hot.

It’s unbearable, that touch, unendurable, and she closes her eyes and keens against her lips and teeth.

“Please, you fucker. _ Please_.”

“Look at me,” he rasps, voice rusty iron. “Don’t look away, don’t close your eyes. Look at me.”

She obeys.

And good god, he’s a sight. He’s all over her, weighing her into the mattress, covering her, making her inhale his exhales. His pupils are eclipses, impenetrable, no light. When he’s sure he’s got her undivided attention he reaches between them and takes himself in hand, lines himself up.

“Breathe for me.”

He’s not asking out of consideration, to ease his passage into her. He’s asking for her breaths to belong to him.

So she gives him breaths, and words to go along with them.

“He won’t let you have me.”

Agency. Free will. Beautiful things. Golden things. She holds them in her hands right now, in this moment, but she won’t hold them for long.

“I know,” he says and pushes inside. She forces more words past the fullness, the pleasure of the almost-pain.

“And you, you won’t try and take me from him.”

“I won’t,” he affirms, as he moves slowly in and out, and she wraps her legs around his waist. “And you won’t try and stop him when he wants you, will you?”

“I won’t” she echoes him, solemnly, and she is proud of herself for managing not to cry.

He spins them then, so she’s on top, but every time she thinks she grasps some power he plucks it from her hands again, won’t allow her to set the pace or the path. He should wield less strength in this position, but he doesn’t, he snaps upwards and into her so fast she can’t breathe. Pulls her down onto him with each thrust, and it’s so hard and it’s so deep and it’s so wrong. When she looks down on him, past her breasts and belly, she sees frenzy, she sees rage, and his movements are otherworldly in their sharpness.

It’s like he’s trying to fuck pieces of her loose so that later he can pick them up and keep in his pockets always. Like he knows he can’t ever have all of her, no not _ all_, but what he _ can _ have he will make count. He fucks her like he wants to own all of her, but knows it’s impossible, completely impossible.

She starts falling, holds him so hard in her body that the tendons on his neck stands like knotted ropes.

“Yes. That’s it. That’s _ it_,” he whispers and goes as deep as he can before he spills. He grinds out her name, her _ real _ name, not her title, and she comes with that, with her identity resting on the tip of his tongue, she soars up into the rafters and hovers there and looks down on them both, two bodies writhing in darkness, the sheen of sweat and desire and maybe-gold making them _beautiful_. 

And she sees how pieces of them both roll across the floor, she sees how prettily they gleam in the candle light, then she rushes back inside her body again and she screams into his mouth.

It takes time to learn how to breathe again, and he’s unwilling to relinquish the air in her lungs.

Afterwards he’s got a leg thrown over her, holding her down so she can’t float away, and he runs his hands along the lines of her throat and she thinks that even now he’s wanting to hurt. Cause pain. Be the one _ mastering _ it.

“How do you know my name?”

“Sleep,” he answers in a whisper. “Sleep. Tomorrow Joseph comes.” His voice is calm, unbothered. 

_ We all fall down._


	11. Chapter 11

  
  


* * *

**  
Chapter 11**

* * *

She comes to squinting into winter sun. It’s tumbling through the windows, wild and unchecked, rambunctious, and it strokes her forehead and eyelids and cheeks with golden fingertips. She wonders how something can be warm and cold at the same time. 

Comforting. 

_ Jarring_.

She sits up, and the room spins. She grits her teeth against it, doesn't have time, is used to worse. Much worse. Or so she tells herself.

She looks around, and she’s alone.

It’s the first time she’s seen John’s bedroom in daylight and it’s surprisingly sparse, overly large though it is. The bed with its bedside tables, the desk, an armchair. Animal pelts on the floor, ceiling up to the rafters, and it’s light and airy despite all the wood. 

There are some paintings and photographs on the walls, all bird’s eye views of landscapes. She doesnt recognise any of the locations, but they all manage to be both stark and verdant at the same time. River deltas like veins and arteries. Brutalist coast lines. Volcanic mountain formations. Greens and blacks and mauves, and she wants to get lost in them, but now isn’t the time. 

On the desk, placed carelessly on top of all the paperwork, stands a tray. Orange juice. Oatmeal probably no longer warm. Couple of slices of toast.

Even though she hasn’t eaten anything but what amounts to scraps in, oh, three days? four? she leaves the food be for now and walks naked across the floor. Tries the door. 

Locked, and she’s hardly surprised.

She tries the other two doors in the room. Walk-in wardrobe. Enormous. The other one leads to the bathroom. She’s been in it before, of course, but it overwhelms her senses even more now, contrasted as it is to the minimalist bedroom. In here it’s all Italian marble and gilded taps and plenty mirrors. Gaudy. It’s gaudy.

She uses the toilet, splashes some water on her face while carefully avoiding those mirrors, then she heads out into the bedroom again.

Window next. Large, latticed casement. This one she knows well. Beautiful views of pines and mountain peaks, but she hardly cares about that right now. She only cares that it turns out to be unlocked. 

She’s got it halfway unlatched when she notices a guard standing right below, waving up at her with faux cheer. A jolly prison warden. She gives him a stiff middle finger back, chewing her lip so hard she fears it might bleed.

Fuck. _ Stupid_. 

When John comes back she’s wrapped in a sheet, sitting at the desk eating stone cold oatmeal and stale toast.

She sees right away that the quiet contemplativeness of him from last night is gone, replaced with that sharp-teethed, restive thirst for hurt and blood. She sees it in his movements, she sees it in the flashes of white in his eyes. 

He slams the door shut behind him, locks it, and walks across the room to her, bends down and drops a kiss on the top of her head. He leaves a bloody smear on her waist, stark against the white of the sheet. A bright, vivid red. Fresh blood.

She studies him closer, and realises his shirt sleeves are soaked in blood. She just hadn’t seen it straight away, because he’s in dark silk. He looks like he’s been elbow-deep in a pig carcass, only it’s not pigs he is butchering, is it?

He follows the line of her eyes.

“I got antsy,” he explains with a barely-there shrug.

“You left me here while you went to the bunker? Cocky,” she says, trying to hide her disquiet from him even as she knows that she can’t possibly succeed. She stands, because she doesn’t think it wise to remain seated, below him, when he’s this scented to blood.

“Oh, I never left. I’ve got a basement here,” he says off-hand, casual. 

She starts. For some unfathomable reason she had never considered that he would act out his compulsions at home, but of course he would. She doesn’t think he can ever be too far away from bloodshed. That he needs to lie in bed at night knowing that it’s within easy reach, always. Perhaps that, more so than any nightlight, helps him sleep easy.

She falters, because there _ are _ lines of goodness running through her, sharp and acute, and she doesn’t think there is any left in him.

“I just...I don’t...how do you _ stand _ yourself?” and she hates the forlorn rush of her voice. She ought to be angry, repulsed, but she’s mostly sad.

“You still don’t understand, do you? Or rather, you don’t _ want _ to understand.” His voice is barely a murmur now, far removed from his usual manic orating. “We’re saving them. We’re saving all these people. We’ll save _ you_. What is a little pain for a life beyond the end of the world?”

“Don’t bullshit me, John. That’s not why you’re doing it and you know it. Joseph, perhaps, has some altruistic reasons for his madness. You do not.”

He steps close to her, he steps right into the beam from the window, into the sunshine she occupies. And she sees something of what she thought about last night, how the sharp winter light brings out the grey in his hair and beard, the lines around his night shining eyes, the tender cruelty about his mouth. The unsteadiness. That scratch across his face is angry and red, and she hadn’t even noticed it last night. Now it’s all laid bare. Everything.

And she thinks she’s similar. That all of her is on display in this light: her hooded eyes, the childish cheeks, the austere Cupid’s bow, the corners of her mouth eternally upturned in a lie. Her sins and her faults and the blood on her hands.

Indeed, both of them _ are _ better in lowlight. In night.

Joseph, on the other hand, somehow he always looks like he _ belongs _ in sunlight. It _ flatters _ him, even though it brings out the fervour of his madness, makes it burn like a winged halo around him.

Of course, Joseph has never ever given her any choice, any options. John, despite the crack-shatter of his sanity, his cruelty, somehow manages to encapsulate _ choice _ into captivity.

Quite skillful, really.

Now he steps closer still, wraps his arms about her, speaks with his lips against her forehead.

“Don’t do that. You’re comparing us. Stop comparing us.”

“Hard not to,” she says drily, breathlessly, and notes that her sheet is falling to the floor. Doesn’t care. He moves back slightly so that he can better take her in, all of her, her skin, her faults and cracks lit by daytime, and she doesn’t mind. 

They both see each other clearly.

“Joseph will be along shortly. You should shower, put something on.”

She gestures vaguely between them both.

“Does he know? _ Will _ he know?”

He kisses her then, wolfs her down with frightening hunger, but he’s careful not to leave any marks. He didn't last night either, and she thinks that only Joseph can do that, only Joseph may paint her with teeth and lips and fingers.

Of course, John did have his go. She feels him stroking along the letters on her chest, even as he takes a step back again.

“He doesn’t. And he won’t. Not unless you suddenly find yourself possessed with an urgent need to confess, and if you haven’t so far I don’t see why you should start now.”

His tone is flippant but she sees how the corner of his eyes pinch with guilt and jealousy.

“And how about you? What about your need to confess? Are you not one of his most devoted disciples?”

“Oh, I think I can contain it,” he drawls, and lets his hand drop lazily from her chest.

As she had begun to suspect: he’s cherry picking from Joseph’s teachings.

“This won’t end well,” she says and starts towards the bathroom.

“You’re quite right,” he calls after her. “The whole _ world _ will end.”

“Oh for fuck’s...”

She showers while he’s by the sink washing blood from his hands and arms, his shirt thrown on the floor. She stands underneath the water and welcomes her clearer head. Her mind is working at breakneck speed now, looking for openings in the clouds, looking for ways to fly away. 

But her mind... while it does fly it seems to always land again on Joseph, like a falcon called to the jess.

She hates it.

She hates how she misses Joseph even as she plots to escape him, and she hates how she wants to be close to John even when he takes such unfettered delight in maiming and killing. It doesn’t work in her head, it doesn’t gel, the conflicts tear into each other and she grinds down on the trauma of it. Crushed glass in her mouth.

She had always thought of herself as strong. That makes this worse, how easily they have unmade her, snared her. Made her _ theirs_.

“How do you know my name?” she asks.

He turns around, leans against the vanity and dries his hands on a towel as he watches her through the steamed-up shower cubicle.

“We’ve known it all along. We knew all of your names before you even flew over the border into Hope.”

A beat, as she wills her rage to settle. They’d never had fucking chance, had they, never had a hope in hell to just make the arrest and leave. 

“Which sin did you tattoo onto Nancy’s chest?”

He barks out a laugh, kicks his shirt across the floor towards the laundry basket.

“I honestly can’t remember. Probably greed.”

She turns off the shower and steps out, shivers, accepts the towel he’s handing her.

“Let’s find you something to wear.”

She’s got only his clothes to pick from, and she chooses one of his most garish shirts just out of spite. There’s no underwear, and she’s having to fold a pair of his sweats multiple times around her waist, even with the new shape of her.

She pads barefoot ahead of him towards the door.

“I hate this.”

“I know. I know you do.” He puts a hand on the side of her neck from behind, splays his fingers. “But you’ll see soon. You’ll _ see_. And then you will walk with us into Eden.” 

She puts her hand on top of his, turns around and meets his eyes squarely. 

“You want me, but you won’t _ try _ for me, will you?”

She knows she can’t manipulate Joseph, but maybe, just maybe, she can manipulate John. 

He doesn’t answer. He reaches around her and unlocks the door.

* * *

They walk down the stairs together just as Joseph comes through the front door. He’s wearing the same shearling coat as he did when he captured her out in the forest, the cream fleece of the upturned collar brushing his jaw and ears. A quick glance tells her that he’s as armed as always, guns and knives and eyes already _ mastering _ her even though she’s still halfway across the room. Before he can close the door behind him she sees that he’s brought more guards, several of them fanned out on the drive, all of them hefting machine guns. She feels sure there are more of them out back, indeed along the entire perimeter of the property. 

Joseph correctly interprets her look.

“The end draws near and the unrest is great out there. Security measures are needed more now than ever.” His lips twitch in faint amusement. “They’re not here purely for your sake, though I dare say it’s not entirely unwarranted.”

She stops, with John at her back, but Joseph continues across the floor until he reaches her. His grip on her arm is proprietary, his kiss bordering on punishing. She leans into it, drinks it down despite herself. Despite feeling the warmth of John on her neck. Joseph touches a hand to her belly and closes his eyes, and she thinks he might be trying to commune with the life in there, might convince himself there’s a tangible connection.

“Are you well?” he asks.

She wants to vomit spite and incredulity all over him, scream at him; is he not a tyrant keeping her and many others caged and under his thrall, how can she _ possibly _ be well? But she hasn’t the energy, it would be fighting against windmills, and so she simply shrugs.

He gestures towards the large dining table and leads her over, pulls a chair out for her. She sits as he lets his hand slide slowly down her back, a gentle touch, a patronising touch, and she bites the inside of her cheek against the urge to chase after it. To want more. 

He walks around the table and takes a seat opposite her. John sits down to her right, a few chairs away, as Joseph pinches the bridge of his nose and watches her calmly, carefully. 

She meets his eyes, and feels as though his gaze is burning memories from her, like sun burning through mist. She sifts through her mind, tries to remember which memories she’s forgotten now, but she can’t. She _ can’t_. And the pieces she still have, they are threadbare and see-through when held up to the light.

“Why are you here?” she grits out, forces the words through stiff jaws. Fighting the urge to get closer to him, have him envelope her and stop her from thinking.

He sighs a little, as if he can sense the convective loops of the storm cell inside of her and he’s so _ bored _ with all of it. She can feel her shoulders square in response, her chin jut up, and further down the table she sees the corner of John’s mouth twitch in bleak mirth.

“We are preparing to move underground. The end is hovering over us. I’ve readied as much as I can, though the logistics have been made all the more tricky by the destruction of Jacob’s bunker.” Here his eyes go cold and mean behind his glasses, and he looks like he wouldn’t mind hurting her. Instead he bows his head as if in prayer. It wouldn’t surprise her. Perhaps he’s asking his God for patience with her. Perhaps for mercy for his older brother’s rotten soul.

Perhaps they could all join in a fucking prayer circle and pray her far away from here.

“And?”

He sighs again. 

“I am simply urging you to ready yourself for a life underground. Soon. Sooner than you might think.”

She can already feel her lungs constricting at the thought, and she considers being forced to live deep underneath thousands of tonnes of rock. Ore and kyanite and graphite. Soil in her mouth, her nostrils. Buried alive.

“There’s no way. No way. Joseph...Joseph, you can’t. I’ll fight it, I won’t agree to it. You can’t force me.”

He is grave, as grave as a commandment etched onto a stone tablet.

“I can. I will.”

She imagines spending years down a bunker, forced to wait forever for an Armageddon that just won’t come. The dank air, the unwashed bodies. The petty conflicts, the artificial light. Veering between apathy and crippling claustrophobia. All because of the fever dreams of a fractured demoniac.

A demoniac handling her marionette strings as deftly as any master puppeteer. 

A demoniac she can’t resist.

“Does the notion of free will mean _ nothing _ to you crazy motherfuckers?”

There’s no force behind her voice, it is wispy and thin with her struggle to breathe.

“No.” His voice is certain, as inevitable as the seasons, as storms, as natural disasters. “Not if I have to choose between free will and survival. Can you truly fault me for wanting to save your life? _ Both _ of your lives? The lives of others?”

“I can when it’s based on delusions. When your Collapse is a figment of your imagination. When it _ won’t happen._ How many doomsday cults have there been? Look at the Branch Davidians. Fucking Koresh! Look at Heaven’s Gate. The only way this will end is with a bunch of dead bodies.” She stops, draws a hacking breath. “Well,” she amends quietly, almost in a whisper. “_More _ dead bodies.”

He leans forward on his elbows, his eyes catching hers from behind the lenses. Tractor beams. Irrefutable, undeniable.

“There is one very important distinction between _ them _ and _ me, _Deputy. They were wrong. I am right.”

His belief is absolute, she realises, as unmovable and ancient as the Whitetail mountains, impossible to penetrate or influence. She might as well try to reason with the rushing waters of the Henbane.

She looks down the table at John. He’s been quiet through this, and one look at his face tells her that she can expect no support from him. 

She shakes her head, digs her nails into her thighs to steady herself.

“No. _ No._”

Joseph shoves his chair backwards then, so violently that she reaches down towards her waist for a service weapon that is no longer there. A worthless muscle memory, an impotent instinct. She grinds her teeth and forces herself to stay still.

He comes to her side, offers his hand. 

“Well then. Come. There is something I’d like you to see.”

She takes his hand and for a flickering heartbeat she considers using the connection between them to hurl him forward, slam his face into the edge of the table and run. A foolish impulse, of course. She’d get nowhere. So she allows him to lead, and he takes her to the utility room beyond the kitchen, to a door that she’s never paid much heed because it’s always been locked and off limits to her. It’s unlocked now though, and Joseph urges her on, gestures her down a long set of concrete steps.

She goes, even though she knows, she _ knows_, that she shouldn’t.

John’s basement.

Just one large space. Packed dirt floors, rough stone walls shiny with damp. The middle of the space poorly lit by a naked light bulb, swinging listlessly from a pull cord.

And beyond that, in the shadows by the far wall...

She walks forward, Joseph close at her back, and she knows that whatever this is, it will be terrible. Horrific. The stench of blood is a living thing at the back of her throat, making her gag on iron and copper and phantom pain.

A couple of steps more, into the light and out of it again. Her eyes slowly adapting to the dark, a figure emerging from shadows.

Staci.

She takes him in, this man she hadn’t known for long before Hope County happened, but had grown to like nonetheless.

There’s not a lot left of him.

Tied to a chair, his face is swollen, black and blue. A chunk of his cheek is torn away, and she can see his jaw and molars clean through. His fingers are broken, twisted in awful, unnatural directions, and one shoulder is dislocated.

Bloodied bubbles spring from his nose and lips with each breath, telling her that he’s as grievously injured on the inside as he is on the outside.

She had last seen him after she killed Jacob. She had freed him, and despite everything done to him, despite Jacob having broken his mind in two, there had been a cautious, heartbreaking optimism on his face as he had led the destruction of the bunker. She had left him and the militia to it, too full of conflicting emotions to stay in the Whitetails. She had fled into the Henbane, and eventually gotten herself just as captured, and isolated, and lost.

“John did this?” Her voice is a croak.

“No,” Joseph says, and she is ashamed of her relief, ashamed, because John could very _ well _ have done this. This, and worse. Much worse.

“Deputy Pratt was part of the, ah, _ extraction _ team that attempted to liberate you recently. I’m sure you remember. He was captured. Yesterday he tried to escape. I fear the Judge wolf that hunted him down got a bit...overzealous. As did the Chosen that caught up with them. I understand Deputy Pratt resisted recapture.”

She had not seen him that night, upstairs. She had been too distracted, and John had dragged her away almost immediately. The only one she had seen was Hudson.

“What about the others?” she asks without turning her head, cannot possibly tear her gaze away from the waking night horror that is what remains of Staci.

“All of them safe in John’s Gate.”

She suspects that her and Joseph’s definition of ‘safe’ is at polar opposites.

At the sound of their voices Staci attempts to look up at them, but his head loll uselessly on his neck, and he can’t seem to focus through his swollen eyes. One eye socket looks broken, imploded.

“Please,” he whispers, his voice wet. “Please. Please. _ Please please please,_” over and over again, a broken chant, such useless mantra. She’s convinced he’s not actually talking to her, that he’s not even aware that she’s here, that he’s pleading with Jacob, Joseph, John, the Judge wolf that tore into him. But then her name crawls through his stained lips.

Morn. 

It shivers on the clammy air, hangs there for all to see. The second time she’s heard it in as many days, and oh how she hates it now. She wants to erase it from time, allow it to get lost along with so many of her memories and pieces of self. 

“The _ rest _ of your former colleagues are still safe,” Joseph repeats behind her, and oh yes, she takes his meaning, she understands _ perfectly _how this chokehold works.

_ Jesus. Fuck. _

She begins weeping, takes the one step separating her and Staci and gently, so gently, brushes his uninjured cheek with the back of her hand. He leans forward slightly, rests his head on her stomach, and she strokes his matted, bloody hair with both hands. Bows her head and kisses his crown. His blood settles on her like lipstick.

Slowly she moves around, until she stands behind him with her hands hovering above his shoulders, being so careful with his dislocated one. Softly she slides one hand forward and grasps his chin, directs his head into a bow. She looks across the room and sees that John has joined Joseph down here, they stand side by side watching her. Not moving, but they are drawn sharply, the lines of them, quick strokes and hardly any negative spaces. Both rendered in claire-obscure, turning shadows into clothing.

She meets both of their eyes as she breaks Staci’s neck as gently as she can, then she walks past them on her way to the stairs. Wiping her hands on her trousers, gulping down sobs. Joseph’s face is unreadable, stoic, but John looks like he’s made of pure electricity and glee.

* * *

  
She’s back in John’s shower, stands braced with both hands against the wall. She watches Staci’s blood run in streams from her fingers, down the tiles and circling the drain.

“Did it surprise you, when you first came here and discovered how easy it is to kill? Or did you already know?”

John. Right behind her. His tone is conversational, and she doesn’t turn around.

“Where’s Joseph?” she asks the wall.

“Recognised that you need space right now. He’ll be back tomorrow.”

The way he says _ tomorrow _ walks straight across her grave, makes her shiver despite the almost too-hot water. The intonation of that one word is a metal door closing, light forever disappearing, and she knows there is virtually no time left.

She does turn around then, leans back against the wall and faces him.

He stands there under the fancy rainwater spray with her, fully dressed. Hair dripping water into his eyes, shirt and jeans plastered against his body. He doesn’t touch her, but his hands are twitching by his side.

“Did he tell the truth? It wasn’t you who did that to Staci?”

He smiles, but it’s his lawyer smile, his evangelist smile, and she wonders if he hadn’t indulged a little after all.

“I merely took delivery and got him situated. Messy business. Now…” He turns serious again, and the things in his eyes tumble and dive. “You didn’t answer my question, Deputy.”

He grabs her arms, pulls her towards him so that her nose is almost touching his chest. She’s in the middle of the spray now. She takes the full force of it, nothing exists outside of it, just the beating of water on the crown of her head and what might be his heartbeat against the tip of her nose.

His question runs down her hair with the water, into her eyes and her mouth and comes back out as an answer.

“No, it didn’t surprise me. Yes, I already did know.”

He touches her forehead with his knuckles, follows with a brush of lips and beard.

“Good girl.”

“At least this isn’t a cold river,” she says tonelessly, and he tilts his head back, laughs into the rush of water.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Valentines? 
> 
> Morn is of the Middle English mōrn, morwen, and it means of course morning. I thought it fitting, in view of Joseph’s vision of a new dawn.
> 
> It’s also a small tribute to one of my all time favourite literary characters, Morn Hyland, from Stephen Donaldson’s Gap Cycle. Morn Hyland was a rookie ensign with the story’s space police force, and she fell into very nefarious hands indeed.


	12. Chapter 12

* * *

**Chapter 12**

* * *

  
It’s later that day, and night is beginning to prowl down from the mountains. Winter dusk does that, she reflects, it slinks forth like a cat with stars in its fur. It insinuates and purrs and rubs about the ankles of trees and houses and then, all of a sudden, all is blackest night.

It snows again, and she watches the snowflakes drift through the open kitchen door along with a brazing chill. John blocks the opening, leans against the doorframe with a cigarette. Tiny crystals settle in his hair, and she clenches her hands against the urge to brush them off, be close to him.

After what happened in his basement...she needs contact. Touch. A pity that the only available option is one of the men that forced her hand.

They’re waiting for a couple of frozen microwave meals to heat. She moves slowly about the kitchen, feeling too small for her body, feeling restless and wild but too tired to be overt about it. She circles the island, fidgets, picking things up only to put them back again. She finds a length of jute kitchen twine in a drawer and starts braiding her hair. It’s only a loose one pulled over her shoulder, leaving curls free by her temples and neck, but it feels nice to be slightly tidier again. She wraps the twine several times round the end of the braid and finishes the whole thing with a big jaunty bow.

“I want my own clothes,” she says. “I’m tired of wearing yours.”

He doesn’t answer, and she turns to look at him. He stands with his head resting against the door jamb, lazily blowing out deep smoke clouds and watching her through them with hooded eyes. Never letting go of her, following her every move. 

“What?” she eventually asks.

He throws the cigarette into the snow outside and she watches how it fizzles and dies as he closes the door.

“It’s the first time I’ve seen you kill in such close proximity,” he says as he walks across the floor towards her. “It was beautiful. _ You _ were beautiful.”

His eyes are languid and blown. He looks like he’s just been fucking, or like he’s high.

“He was a friend,” she reminds him, shoulders stiff, unearned sorrow clouding her eyes.

“Sorry for your loss, Deputy,” he mocks 

“Morn,” she says quietly.

“I’m sorry?” He stops when he’s comfortably into her space, makes it his own as always. Plays a little with one of the curls she left loose, wraps it around his finger and tugs a little. She resists stepping into him.

“My name is Morn. You all know that, turns out you’ve known all along. So why won’t you use it? Why will you only call me by my title?”

He just smiles at her, that smile of his that manages to be sanguinary and vulnerable at the same time, and says nothing. Lets her figure it out on her own. And she does, and she almost wishes that she hadn’t. 

Goddamn them. 

“It’s all part of your little unmaking process, isn’t it? Never mentioning my name, isolating me, chaining me, stripping me to the bones. Drinking me empty of marrow. _ Erase _ me and break me and start over with the pieces. Is that it?”

He inclines his head in silent confirmation. How unusual, she thinks, for him to be quiet through such revelations, for him not to orate and preach, use his voice as the sinuous, destructive tool it is.

“And all that bullshit about golden joinery and grace and light, Joseph really believes in that, doesn't he? Gold as blood. But you...you’re somewhere else on the spectrum, aren’t you? More of a reaver. More about _ night_.”

He doesn’t answer but then he doesn’t need to, and she makes the decision right there. To catch whatever pieces are left of her out of the ether before they float away entirely. Grasp them and shove them into her mouth, chew them and swallow them and make sure they can never escape her again.

Fuck gold and light.

Morn. Her name is Morn, and there is nothing golden about her.

John had slipped up while deep inside her, then Staci had made her name his last word. They had both reminded her. Now John will _ keep _ reminding her. She looks him straight in the eye, puts her hand above his where he’s still holding her curls. 

“You’ll call me Morn from now on. Not Deputy. Do you understand? I want you to.” 

His smile widens, becomes something so sharp and keen that she’s sure she can feel blood running down into her eyes.

“Remember what I told you on this very subject?”

She remembers. She remembers because it had stood out as twisted, paradoxal advice, she had just been too distracted to properly take it in at the time.

“That human beings are resilient and adaptable, that they will do whatever it takes to survive. You told me to adapt, but not lose track of who I am.”

He lifts her easily, grabs her about her hips and puts her down on the island. She can feel the cold of the granite seep through the thin sweats and into her buttocks and thighs. He gently spreads her legs for him, then insinuates himself between them.

“That’s right. That’s what I said. Walk the line carefully though, because we’re not letting you get away.”

He makes to kiss her, just a quick brush of lips in passing, but she leans into it, prolongs it.

“But you could let me run out of that door,” she speaks into his mouth, let the words drop onto his tongue, wills him to swallow them whole. “You could.”

He grabs her braid instead, wraps it around his fist and pulls her head back so that her neck stretches taut, as graceful and white and fragile as the handle of a bone china cup. This way he forces an intimacy much greater than a kiss; her chest pushes forward into his and their hearts vibrate into each other.

“I can’t let you do that, _ Morn_. Do you know why? If you escape us you die. And you see, I don’t _ want _ you to die.”

“You truly believe him, don’t you?” she whispers and strokes a finger down his cheek, following the healing wound. “You believe that the world is about to go up in flames, you believe in his doomsday preachings. _ Fuck_. I like you better as just a plain sadist.”

He laughs a little, but it’s just shards of bleakness masquerading as amusement.

“Oh, it’s not just belief. It’s also _ want_. But let’s focus on the belief, for now. _ Think _ a little. How long have you been here? In Hope County?”

“I don’t know,” she hisses, feeling suddenly like the night cat she had thought of earlier, in a split second going from affectionate indolence to claws in skin. There’s something in his voice, his intensity, that unsettles her, makes her skin itch. “You’ve all done your best to make me lose track of time, haven’t you. Five months, or so?”

“That’s about right,” he agrees, and moves impossibly closer to her even as he keeps holding her by her braid, runs his free hand up her side. “And in all that time, have you ever stopped to think about why you’ve heard nothing from the outside? We performed an armed take-over, Morn, we took over an entire county and closed its borders. We cut all communication links. A federal Marshal along with several members of local law enforcement disappear, yet no one comes to look? Why do you think that is? Haven’t you wondered?”

She hadn’t really wondered. At least not recently. She had been too busy surviving and not disappearing into thin air, too caught up in navigating Joseph and John and captivity and everything else they’d done to her. Now she’s colder than the winter outside as she considers his words, yes, chilled to the bone, surprised she can’t see frosty air puff out in front of her with every breath.

“No one’s coming because something bigger is going on out there. Something that means the rule of law goes unheeded. Something that means an entire county can go off-grid and no one thinks to ask. Aren’t you curious what that might be, Morn? Could it perhaps be something _ world altering_?”

She almost regrets insisting he use her name, not when he wraps it up in mad prophecies and words of fire and brimstone, not when it’s used in such a _ way _.

She looks at him, and she can’t think of anything to say. Denial is clogging her throat, sticking to her tongue.

They’re all crazy, she thinks, every single last fucking one of them. They must be.

The microwave beeps. Dinner is ready. 

* * *

  
It’s later still, she thinks they might be about to touch midnight. They’re side by side on the sofa, dirty dinner plates stacked on a side table, and John with a generous few fingers of bourbon in a crystal tumbler. He’s ignoring her, staring broodily out on the ever falling snow.

She doesn’t want to be ignored, doesn’t want to be left with her own thoughts, because they are jumbled and slippery and wholly unpleasant. She doesn’t want to think about what he had said earlier, she doesn’t want to think about what might be going on out there, out in what she has started to think of as the _ real _ world. 

She’s been trapped in this parallel universe for too long, she thinks. This snow globe, this dark fairyland. When she finally manages to escape, will she cross the county line and discover that hundreds of years have passed out there? That time has escaped and nothing remains as she left it? 

_ Far too long. _

She dry-swallows a sob, turns to John. Needs him to anchor her, tie her to him before she floats up and away.

“Cigarettes. Alcohol.” She indicates herself. “Most definitely fornication. I take back what I said earlier. You are a terrible disciple, not devoted at all.”

He seems to pick apart her mood - her reasons, her need to engage - with just a quick glance. Then apparently he decides to humour her.

“Told you before. I see no reason to deprive myself. I follow those of Joseph’s teachings that truly matter. I adhere to them..._ closely_. The rest are inconsequential to me, to what will happen _ after. _Always were.”

The mention of Joseph’s name darkens her mood even more, confuses her, sucks her down in that paradoxal maelstrom of feelings that surround him. She misses him. She abhors him. She longs for his touch. He makes her skin crawl.

“One thing I don’t understand,” she says slowly. “Joseph’s sanctioned the drugging of half the fucking county. Why not me? He could make things real easy for himself. He could dope me with Bliss. He could lead me to that bunker of yours and I’d probably dance down it willingly while humming one of your little cult tunes. Why doesn’t he?”

His quick glance down at her belly is all the answer she needs. 

“He doesn’t know how it would...?” She cuts herself off, clenches her fists. “I spent plenty time in the Henbane after he’d...after we’d...well. I spent weeks seeing shit that wasn’t real, hopped on Bliss. Weeks.”

“Well. Best not to make it any worse, then,” he says lightly, and she closes her eyes, bites her lip. How could she not have thought of this before, considered the implications?

“That goddamned bastard,” she hisses.

“Well,” he drawls and rests an arm along the headrest of the sofa “I’m fairly sure he didn’t particularly want you in the Henbane but, and I don’t know if you know this, you’re not often wont to do as you’re told.”

She’s on her feet then, can’t possibly sit still any longer. Paces in front of the fireplace, only just manages to stop herself from pulling at her hair, undoing her braid. Her vain little symbol of control, of new agency.

“You care for it, don’t you?” He lifts the glass to his lips, takes a generous sip, and smiles at her over the rim. “It’s not even here yet, yet you care for it. You want to protect it.”

“Fucking biology,” she snarls, “fucking _ instincts._” 

But she doesn't deny what he says and her hand is gentle as she touches her belly, as she listens inwards, tries to use her mind to nudge against the flickering being curled in there. Reassure herself that all is well. Reassure the nestled little life that she will always, always care for it, no matter what. 

She _ will_.

She looks up again and sees how he is watching her with a look she’s never before seen on his face, a curious amalgam of emotions she can’t ever hope to untangle or make sense of, but she can taste the metallics of them on the tip of her tongue. He’s always been an alchemist playing with the most unstable of elements, she thinks, no closer to gold than Joseph.

A chimera of longing and rage come through the clearest though. It’s almost a living thing between them, around them, a beast straining against a leash at best half-heartedly held. She imagines that if she reaches out she could run her fingers along it, stroke it. Be devoured by it.

It gives her pause, makes her forget for a moment what they’ve been talking about, what she’s doing, who she is.

He smiles at that, drains his glass, stands. Takes the few steps separating them, grabs her and kisses her. Lazily, all whisky and woodsmoke, and he smiles around the whine she leaves in his mouth. 

“Where to tonight?” he asks, eyes intent, voice without a care which is _ false_. 

He cares. And she knows what he’s asking. Knows there is no choice.

“Tonight? With you,” she says, and he smiles and wraps an arm about her waist, leads her up the stairs.

* * *

  
He wakes before her. She opens her eyes and he’s showered and dressed and sitting perched on the side of the bed next to her, water droplets still clinging to his hair. She hurtles upright because she hasn’t slept this well or this deeply since well before Hope, and that’s terrifying to her. She gets off the bed, needs to stand on her legs to brace against the look in his eyes.

“It’s _ today,” _he tells her, like the word ought to have a capital T, like it needs its own, new chapter in Joseph’s fucking book. She feels how time sieves through her fingers and pools by her feet before bleeding into the wooden floor. 

“What do you mean?” she asks as she hunts around for clothes, strewn about the bedroom as they are from last night. Eventually she gives up on finding it all and heads into his closet, comes out wearing yet another odd assortment of his clothes, luxurious and ill fitting.

“What do you mean?” she asks again but of course she knows, she’s just trying to swat the truth right out of the air so she doesn’t have to look at it. Trying to make it into something else.

“You know what I mean,” he says, his voice low, his body language unusually, disquietingly restrained. “It’s time.”

He’s by the desk, carefully organising all his papers into folders, piling up his ledgers, putting it all into boxes. He’s the reaper, she remembers, and she feels sure that about ten years worth of rations and souls and medical equipment and...and goddamned Books of Joseph are detailed on those lists. He finishes, looks at her, suddenly all brisk practicality.

“A car will be along for us any minute now. Joseph will meet us there. He would’ve liked to come here for you himself,” _to_ _make sure you won’t cause any trouble_, says his expression clear as day, “but there is too much to do. We had counted on three bunkers, and now we only have two. There’s been a lot of reshuffling happening.”

Suddenly and stupidly she longs for him. For Joseph. For his total dominion over her, his hold. For the peculiar freedom in having no choice at all, in being told what to do. _ Possession _. Blind obedience. It would be so easy then, to just go along with it all and tell herself there is nothing she can do.

But there is. 

She carefully rebraids her hair and thinks. She’s running out of time. Once she’s underground with them, once they’ve locked and barricaded those reinforced doors to await a fictional end of times...she will be trapped.

She’d bring a child into a world where skies and birds and stars are replaced by concrete and generators. All because of delusions and guilt and petty tyranny.

It’s unthinkable.

John unlocks the bedroom door, gestures her ahead of him. She goes.

They come downstairs to fervent activity. There are shaggy, ragtag cultists everywhere, packing things up, shuffling furniture around. They’re even removing the Project’s banners from the heavy ceiling beams, and she would roll her eyes if she wasn’t so busy assessing her situation. 

All the curtains are open, and she stops and considers the weather. The snow now falls with a single minded ferocity she’s never seen before, it whirls and howls and traces chaos theory through the air. She’s never seen such elemental fury, almost like a sentient being, a demi-god of winter, is trying to bury Hope alive.

It’s a total white-out, and she can barely make sense of any direction. Once outside of the house it will be impossible.

“Morn.”

She slowly turns to look at him, and suddenly realises she is coiled, that her entire body is poised to strike and attack. All that deadly energy with no outlet. She almost whines in frustration, shivers, near paralysed by instincts with nowhere to go.

He sees too, and smiles. Delights. 

“The car is here.”

While she’s been distracted by the weather he’s put a down parka on, pulled the hood up over his head. He’s wearing heavy boots, and hands her a pair too. Her own, she realises, the pair she wore the day she was first brought here. She puts them on, laces them up, then looks around for a coat. All she gets is John’s quirked eyebrows.

“John, I swear…” she starts, but he cuts her off.

“I don’t trust you as far as I can throw you. You know that. Don’t worry, we’ll crank the heating up for you.”

He opens the doors and flanked by guards and with an arm slung around her shoulders he ushers her out to the car. The standard flatbed cult truck, she notes. A driver, and another man in the passenger seat. Both armed. Both there to make sure she doesn’t try anything.

The wind lashes at her, turns snowflakes into tiny, razor-edged projectiles, steals her breath straight from her mouth.

John opens the door to the backseat, heaves her up, then slides in after her. With just the few steps between door and car she is covered in snow, she licks it from her lips and blinks it from her eyelashes.

“Go,” John says curtly, and the truck starts rolling down the drive. She turns around in the seat, looks out the back window. With the way the snow whirls the ranch disappears from view immediately. She won’t see it again, she knows she won’t see it again, and she tries to tamp down the forlorn finality of it. 

_ Stupid. _

They turn out onto the road, and she’s looking for landmarks, knows that they ought to be passing the crop circle right about now but she can see nothing, nothing but white. Sheets of snow blow across the narrow road, all but erasing it.

Eradicating all man-made lines on the landscape. 

John sits poised, leaning slightly forward with one elbow up on the seat in front of him, one eye on her, the other out between the two front seats and through the windshield, onto the road ahead. Alert, ready.

She’s unsure what it is he’s expecting. Falling trees? The Resistance? The actual Collapse?

They do a right onto the main road, and she can feel how the winds grab hold of the truck, shake it about. The driver is hunched low, all focus on navigating through the storm. A little bit further, and they turn in on the winding mountain road that leads up to John’s Gate. The wind eases up a little here, sheltered as they are by all the trees. She looks out the window, sees steep slopes and inclines and boulders and lead skies and maybe the faint flicker of freedom in the corner of her eye. She fiddles with her braid, bounces a leg, feels tension and sadness like static in her hair.

“John,” she murmurs and there must be something in her voice that scratches at him because he whips his head around to look at her fully, his undivided attention just for a second, before he stares forward again. Out over the narrow serpentine road, looking for obstacles and threats behind every twist, every turn. That’s fine. She doesn’t really know what she would have said anyway. Perhaps she only wanted the awful comfort of his name filling her mouth.

She takes a deep breath.

Her fist to his temple is practised, whip fast, how many times has she not done that to someone since she flew into Hope? The force of it is enough to slam his head into the window next to him. He slumps, but he’s not unconscious, just temporarily incapacitated.

So used to violence and pain. He’ll shrug this off, she knows. She must be fast.

She rips the twine from her braid, quickly, expediently, then leans over the seat in front and loops it about the driver’s throat. He’d been trying to navigate the car and the snowstorm while reacting to what’s going on in the backseat, and so his gun is only halfway drawn.

She fists the twine hard in one hand, grabs his gun out of his loosening grip, then throws herself backward, puts all her weight behind it. The twine goes taut over his windpipe, forcing him back against the headrest, and at the same time she shoots the guard in the passenger seat through the head. 

Ah, yes. She looks at the blood spattered onto the windshield and she flows back into her killer suit, fluid, easy, adrenaline crooning in her ears. 

Familiar. Safe.

She giggles.

She braces her feet against the back of the driver’s seat and pulls the twine harder, delights in the choking noises he’s making. In her periphery John is stirring, shaking his head a little, and she pulls even harder. The car is starting to swerve dangerously and she wills the dumb motherfucker up front to take his foot off the gas before he gets everyone killed, not just _ himself._

But he doesn’t. 

Dimly she’s aware that John has thrown himself across the seat and grabbed hold of her, is half folded around her, and she realises he’s trying not to stop her but to shield her.

Then they are airborne. 

All slows down. There are the sharp cracks of metal tearing and bones breaking, then her hearing goes and the only sense she is left with is the ability to see white. Everything is quiet. She floats weightless, can see her hair fan gently out in front of her, unencumbered by gravity, even though she understands, knows, that they are in violent motion. She’s distantly fascinated with the contrast her dark hair makes against all the white, with how _ light _ she is. 

As light as a feather. 

Then the truck lands on its side with a deep groan of metal and starts sliding down the steep hill.

All sensation returns with a sharp whiplash jolt and she’s helpless in the force of the brutal motion, is thrown hard into a body - John, she thinks inconsequentially, inhaling his wildfire smell - and then it ends in a crash that hurls her even harder into him, with something raining down over her, hurting her.

They are still.

She takes a second, just a second, to breathe. In and out, deep breaths. 

_ Morn. My name is Morn. _

She lifts her head, tests her limbs. She can move. Nothing appears to be broken. She is covered in shards of glass from the busted windshield, they glint on her like sharp little snowflakes, echoing the weather outside. Her hair, her shoulders, her face. The back of her hands. They fall gently down around her when she moves, twinkling in the faint light.

The truck is upended, resting on its side. John is closest to the ground, between her and the caved-in door, has cushioned her and taken the brunt of it. He’s quiet and still. She gets a hand inside his collar and feels for a pulse. It’s there, unsteady but present. There’s blood streaking down his face though, vibrant and red and plentiful, and she can’t say anything about what’s going on inside him. His bones. His organs. 

She shivers, reminded that she’s only in one of his sweaters and a pair of rolled-up designer jeans. First things first though. She finds the gun she took from the driver and leans awkwardly into the front seat. Checks. The driver is dead, an angry red line across his throat. His body is bent and twisted wrong; a broken back on top of the damage she did to his windpipe, she thinks. 

She rummages around for more weapons and ammunition, pockets what she can find and then stands up in a crouch, careful not to step on John. She shoves at the door above her. It opens without any resistance, and she sucks in a stuttering breath of relief, tries to rid herself of noxious claustrophobia and terror. She sticks her head and shoulders out and takes stock. 

They’ve slid a ways down the mountain slope and into a dense throng of trees, come to a violent stop against a massive Douglas fir. Its low branches are enveloping the truck, shielding it from sight, and she’s having to push some aside to look around. She can’t even see up to the road in this weather, everything a swirling, ferocious white. It will take some time for the cult to find the truck down here, if they even find it at all. It’ll be covered in snow soon enough, just another part of the frozen, white landscape.

Gone until spring.

She couldn’t have chosen a better spot for this if she’d tried, she thinks bleakly.

She ducks back inside, and struggles to pull coats and hats and gloves off the two dead men. Unlaces their boots too and takes their socks, bent nearly double in the cramped space, fighting to take deep enough breaths, crying and giggling and muttering to herself. Trying to hold on to hysteria with both hands, but it’s like flapping birds trying to break loose, wings beating in her face. Trying to ignore that while she doesn’t seem to be seriously injured she most certainly is battered and bruised. She takes a second to touch her belly, sends a mute message inwards, wills the life in there to be safe. Protected.

Please. _ Please_.

She crawls over to John again, crunching through broken glass, and checks him once more. Still breathing, his frozen breath enveloping her face in clouds, but he’s not moving. His face a pallid white, the edges of his lips tinged a cold blue. 

Impotently she turns his collar up, pulls down his coat sleeves down over his bare hands and tugs the hood closer over his head. As if that will protect him against the elements, save him in any way.

_ Morn. I’m Morn. _

“I’m sorry,” she whispers against his bloodied temple, and it’s the second time she’s told him that and the second time she’s meant it.

She strokes a finger along his cheekbone, through the blood, draws a little star on his forehead with it. She wants to reach into his pockets and take back those pieces of her that he stole, but there is no time, and she can’t bear leaving him with nothing.

So she lets him keep them, and she runs empty-handed instead.


	13. Chapter 13

* * *

**  
Chapter 13**

* * *

  
She runs, and there is only static in her veins, not blood.

She runs, and her sobs are freezing to ice before they leave her mouth.

She _ runs_.

* * *

...She doesn’t get very far.

* * *

She can't be more than twenty minutes out when she feels herself hesitate, her steps slowing. 

She is traversing the mountainside, intent on making her way down to the main thoroughfare, and from there to Fall’s End, or really any kind of shelter. Even though she is walking in the open she isn’t concerned about being spotted, such is the intensity of the storm. She is cloaked in white, she is hidden in plain sight. And no planes or helicopters can possibly take flight in this weather.

But she is unsure what she is even doing anymore.

She stops and listens to the silence of the snowfall. Shivers, bites her lip. The threads of her will are twisted into kinks and knots, so tangled that her frozen fingers can’t ever hope to undo them all.

He would die. He _ will _ die. 

If he’s not already gone.

The cold alone is enough to finish him off, and if he’s injured on top, then...no chance. No chance at all. He would be yet another life on her head, another body broken by her hands. 

Does it matter, though? she thinks. At this rate, with all the blood on her hands, what is one more drop? What is one more river?

And how much blood has he himself spilt? If ever anyone deserves to die, it’s John Seed. Wicked and ruined. Exulting in the pain of others; irredeemable.

...And thoroughly burrowed under her skin, nestled somewhere inside the bird cage of her ribs. Taking up about the same amount of space as his brother, yes, they are curled about a rib each, merged with her marrow. 

Would she feel the loss, she wonders, would she feel it if he died? Or if Joseph died? Would she _ know?_ Perhaps it would tear physical holes in her body. Perhaps it would break open the safe cage of her ribs and leave her heart entirely exposed, raw and gleaming in the light.

She allows herself just a moment to lament how irrevocably they have altered her: down to a cellular level, down to her very atoms.

Then she turns around.

There’s a terrible urgency about her movements now, she’s got regret and doubt and pain snapping at her heels. 

She knows she's not doing the right thing. She _ knows_.

But she simply can’t bear to leave him for dead. He has, in his own fucked up, horrible way, guided her through captivity and insanity. He has been _ inside _ her. She has done terrible things, and so has he, and so has Joseph, and now...and now...

It is not lost on her that she is moving faster on her way back than she did running away, even though she’s running uphill. If she’s too slow her footprints will disappear and she will be lost.

“’_I’d make a deal with God’,_” she wheezes, and wastes precious breaths on laughter. _ “‘Be running up that hill…’._”

Oh, she’s an idiot, and even as she runs back to her jailer she can feel how her identity realigns itself, how entire swathes of it becomes corrupted and dyed the strangest, sickest hue of grey.

But somehow she’s still treating freedom as something _ real_, not a mirage lost in snow, not fool’s gold glimmering in cold. He will have a radio on him. He always does. She’ll put a call out for help, then leave again once she’s sure someone’s coming to pick him up.

She slows down, starts looking upwards for signs of where the truck slid down the slope. It should be around here. The tracks left will already be snowed over, she’s sure, but after some searching she can see a few broken branches, scuffed bark, disturbed nature. And then she finds the truck right where she left it, already with snow accumulated on it, softening its harsh metal lines and enveloping it into the lull of frozen death.

It’s shaded here, under the trees, a silent and a blue-tinged white, almost peaceful. She wants to curl up right next to the wreck, pull the branches down and around her like a blanket and sleep through winter and this whole impossible life.

But she can’t. So she jumps up on the truck instead, unsteady, her centre of gravity already affected by the changes in her body, and crawls to the door. Wrenches it open, climbs carefully inside. Lands right next to John, and he is as quiet and still as when she first caused this situation and left. She ignores the dead men in the front seat, snakes her hand inside the collar of his parka, then inside his shirt, travels down his chest, past the raised letters of _‘sloth’ _to find his heart.

It beats.

A stuttered breath whooshes past her lips and she slumps a little. 

“Thank Go...fuck,” she mutters. She refuses to remove her hand from his heart, irrationally convinced that it will cease beating if she does, and rummages one-handed through his pockets for a radio. She won’t entertain the notion that he for once isn’t carrying one, that possibility doesn’t exist in her world right now. But it takes some time before her nails finally scratches over metal casing in one of his inner pockets, and she awkwardly pulls the radio out with her left hand while her right remains on his heartbeats.

The casing is badly cracked, the antenna bent. She brings it to her mouth anyway, and stabs down on the receiver with her thumb. 

“Joseph? Joseph! I...you…you bastard, I _ need _ you now. Come in. Come in, Joseph. Over.”

Silence. Not even static, and she knows what that means. Dumbly she shakes the radio, as if that will fix it, and tries again.

“Joseph! John is hurt. I don’t...I don’t know how bad. Please. I need help here. Joseph, _ please._”

Only silence. She drops the radio but not John’s heartbeats, holds on to them as she considers her situation. She can never carry or drag him back up the slope. She’s small and damnably weakened, her canines dulled by the Seed brothers, her claws trimmed. And she’s already done far too much to risk the life cradled inside her, the guilt of it like acid on her will. She can’t do any more now. 

She pulls her hand from his chest and strokes the bird wings of his hair away from his forehead, then unsteadily stands and prepares to climb up and out of the door again.

“Morn.”

She looks back down.

His eyes are still closed, he’s still whiter than all of the snow, but one corner of his mouth is curled in a half smile. She crouches again, slowly, carefully.

“I knew you would come back.”

She scoffs, scrabbles around for a plan, a clue, some fucking sense.

“No you didn’t.”

He laughs a little, and it sounds like it hurts, then he opens his eyes. Traps her as surely as if he’d tied her to an office chair in an underground room.

Shit.

“You couldn’t do it, could you? Couldn’t run away.”

“It’s not _ real,_” she murmurs, “what I feel isn’t _ real_. You manufactured it, you and Joseph, you created it. It’s made of blood and Bliss and coercion. It’s...it’s fake.”

He stays in the same position, either too hurt to move or simply preserving his strength. He manages to look like he chose this, like he chose to repose in a snowy car wreck in the Montanan mountains, like this is all he ever wanted. 

“No such thing as a false emotion, Morn. If you feel it it’s real. That’s why you came back.”

She can’t let him continue down this slippery, treacherous path, can’t let him take her with him.

“Do you think you can move? We need to get out of here.”

“Yes,” he says and shrugs, and the shrug hurts, she knows him well enough now to track the pain moving across his face, the infinitesimal little movements and the grim, otherworldly pleasure he takes in it.

She has never met anyone as irredeemable as him, she thinks as she helps him up in this cramped, awful little space full of death, as she supports him when he lifts himself out of the door and onto the side of the wreck. Once there he pauses, looks around. 

“Is this how you planned it?”

“No,” she says shortly as she climbs out after him.

“Let me guess,” he drawls, even as his lips whiten in pain, “the truck was meant to come to a gentle standstill on the side of the road, after which you would escape with me snoozing peacefully in the backseat and my men stone cold dead in the front seat?”

“Something like that,” she mutters and jumps down on the ground.

“That was a terrible plan,” he says and slides down too, teeth clenching against the hurt, a hand coming out to clutch at her arm.

“It was all I had,” she snarls, furious with herself, with him, but with no time to expend the anger. She’s shaking with cold, even wrapped in dead men’s coats and scarves and gloves. They need to move. “How hurt are you?”

“It seems to be mainly my head. I don’t know how bad, but it’s bad.”

She can do nothing but agree with him. The eclipses of his pupils are wildly uneven in the cold sky of his eyes. His gaze is not quite right; now too faraway, now too close. But there’s nothing to be done about it right this moment. The wind isn't as bad down here, but the snow is merciless and sharp. She needs to get him to safety. Then she needs to see to herself.

“We have to get to even ground.”

He makes a show out of squaring his shoulders. His smile is slow, but she can tell that the pain is right there, that it grips him tight and that he leans into it, plays with it. Rules it, instead of letting it rule him.

“Lead on.”

She doesn’t. She climbs behind him even though she knows he will take her with him if he falls. She bites her lip until it bleeds and holds on to his coat sleeve. And it’s horrible. She has no idea how they do it, but she won’t stop, and she won’t let go of him. She’s urging him onwards and up, clawing at shrubs and frozen sedge grass, leaning on tree trunks and watching their exhaustion turn to tiny frost particles mingling with the snow. They have to stop often, so that he can rest, so that she can swear impotently and refuse to let him go.

It can’t be more than 50 yards until they reach level ground, but it feels like 500 miles, and she keeps expecting to lose her grip on him, see him slide back down into the underground where he belongs. But finally the steep slope plateaus, and she sinks down on her knees while he bends over and spits warm red onto cold white, painting abstract with life force.

He’s got other injuries too, beside his head.

“How far from here to your ugly ass bunker?” she asks him from the ground, and he looks around, eyes peculiarly distant, like he’s somewhere else, some_time _ else, lost among strands of timelines inside his head.

“John?”

She’s surprised at how much his injury is hurting her, how phantom sensations of the changes inside his head are affecting her. She needs to get away. Need to leave this whole world behind and forget that these men and their corrupted dogma ever existed. Raise her child far away from here, protected and safe and loved.

Her child. It’s the first time she’s dared to think of it that way. So much at stake. So much.

“_John_.”

He finally answers her. 

“Not overly far, I don’t think. We’ve come way off course, but getting up to here was the worst of it.”

She stands again, and he straightens up, wipes blood from his lips. Some of it clings to his beard, she sees, about to freeze into petrified crimson. She grasps his shoulders, gets close to him, tries not to sink into him and stay there in false safety.

“Listen to me. I’ll help you. I’ll get you there. I’ll drop you on the threshold like the changeling that you are, but then I’m gone. Understand?” 

She shakes him, almost gently, half mindful of his injuries.

“You’ll let me go. You’ll let me leave. Promise me, John. Promise me.”

He’s quiet, but his time-skipping gaze is now trained on her, focused, sharp.

“Swear, John. It’s time for this madness to end. It’s time for me to leave Hope County.”

His voice is silent, but incredibly clear. His voice is snowfall and the end of times.

“The Collapse is not days away, it’s a matter of _ hours_. Do you understand? Joseph has seen it. Why do you think we set out in this storm, if not for the fact that there was no choice? You’re dooming yourself, and not _ just _ yourself. Don’t you see that?”

The mention of Joseph does something horrid to her will. She wants to be close to him again. She wants to kill him. She wants him to hold her and make her forget. She wants to spit in his face.

She shakes snow and doubt and sorrow from her brow. 

“No. No. Enough. Enough of that madness. Swear to me.”

She sees his gaze swivel again, sees how it travels backwards and sideways and forwards in time, sees how his ruptured mind struggles for foothold in the present.

She did that. She did. But he owes her more than she owes him, and so she brings him back to her with a grip on his hair. Forces him to stand still with her right in this moment. He meets her eyes again, and his smile is askew as he speaks.

“I swear.”

She bows her head, brow against his heart. She realises that she trusts him, that she _ believes _ him. He is damaged and beyond all help, he gulps down the pain of others like expensive wine. He’s cruel and vindictive, full of sadistic glee. He’s carved on her skin and fucked her so deep.

And to her knowledge he has never lied to her.

“Good,” she sighs. “_Good_. Then let’s go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter turned into such a massive bastid that I had to cut it in two. The next part coming as soon as I’ve convinced myself it isn’t cow dung. No words on when that might be.
> 
> The song Morn is quoting is ‘Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)’ by Kate Bush


	14. Chapter 14

* * *

**Chapter 14**

* * *

_ Forever you fool me _

_ You’re a heavenly junkie _

_ We live in the dreams you had_

J Berg, ‘Heavenly Junkies’

* * *

  
  


She thinks that John’s view of what isn’t “overly far” might be distorted by his head injury and by the fact that he’s quite insane even on a good day.

She’s got no way of knowing or proving it, but she’s certain they’ve walked for hours. He’s got one of his arms over her shoulder, and she’s got one of hers around his waist. She supports a good amount of his weight, but doesn’t complain, because he runs so hot in this freezing world, and every now and then she presses her face into the side of his neck, inhales burning trees and pretends she’s safe.

Even though she knows she’s anything but.

The sky is of uniform wrought iron and allows no hint of the time of day. She thinks that the only clue will be dusk overtaking them, and she can’t have that. She can’t have darkness. She must be a safe distance gone by nightfall, she must be in shelter away from Joseph and John and their slavering devoted.

At least the weather has gentled. The hysterical winds have calmed and the snow gone from small blood-letting projectiles to bloated fairytale flakes. Some of them are as big as the palm of her hand, and they soothe across her temples and cheeks and lips. Stone cold, fluttering kisses, as if apologising for having hurt her, as if reassuring her that she is a friend.

Well, she thinks, damn well too late for any of that. She decides that she hates winter. It had been new to her, this seductive northern beast, beautiful and fickle and lethal. But she’s never really had the opportunity to enjoy it. Instead she’s been hurtling through it in stolen clothes clutching looted weapons, or she’s been watching it from inside a cage, hands pressed against glass. And it’s been hindering her escape at every turn, this winter, possessive and jealous, determined to keep her in Hope.

John has been quiet for a long while now, and she suspects that he’s really not with her, that he travels removed from them both, lost somewhere in the dark hinterlands of his mind. 

It’s still him leading the way though, with subtle little nudges and cues. Just like Joseph he’s so intimately acquainted with Hope County, so sure in his ownership, that he navigates the wilderness as an afterthought. 

But she, she is scared. Scared for him, but more so for herself and her dwindling chances of escape. She should leave him and run.

She can’t.

“The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, the woods are lovely, dark and deep,” she mutters to herself over and over, ”the woods are lovely…”

Eventually he hears her, it’s enough to bring him back, and he turns his face into hers. So close, they are so _ close_, and she can feel his grin against her cheek.

“Frost, huh?” he says, and his voice is a little bit stronger than before, the mockery and the waspishness back and how she _ welcomes _ it, this sign of life that will undo her. “I can think of another one of his that’s more appropriate. Want to hear?”

He doesn’t wait for her to answer, launches into the old poem heedless of her will.

“_Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those….” _

He’s got a beautiful voice, when he’s not using it to threaten and carry out torture. Deep and melodic. 

“Fuck you,” she bites out, “shut up. Enough. Enough!”

_ “...who favour fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate...” _

“Stop!” she near shouts into the snow, and he huffs a pained, delighted laugh. Then he falters, winces, and she runs a hand across his face, tries to take all of him in, see what hurts him now.

He takes note.

“Oh Morn,” he sighs, triumph mingled with ugly agony in his voice, “you _ like _ me, don’t you?” 

Before she can draw the breath sufficient to deny it he stops her, somehow manages to spin her around to face him fully, grasps her chin between his hands and tilts it so that she must meet his eyes.

“Then I shall swear to you a vow,” he intones, managing to make searing mockery sound like solemn truth, “that if we survive this, get ourselves to safety before the Collapse is over us, then I will fight for you. To _ have _ you.”

_ And you’d lose_, she thinks, but can’t bring herself to say it about loud, nods instead like his words are an oath now etched on her skin, then she reminds him of his other promise.

“You swore you would let me go.”

He nods, and his eyes fall through time again. Faraway. Nearby.

“I did. I did swear that too,” he says, and his voice is strong enough that she might trust in his presence right here with her. Then he coughs blood once more, his lips stained a shiny red, and she believes there’s a real chance that he will die. Bruises are unfurling along his cheekbone and his eyelashes flutter and she needs to keep him anchored _ here_, _ now_, she needs him to stay.

“John. Listen to me. I’ll be gone soon. You’ll never see me again. But one thing I need you to know: All of the decisions I’ve ever made with regards to you have been my _ own_.” And then, because she can’t bear to let him have that much of her, and because she must be nothing but true, she adds “and that makes me doubt them even more.” 

It’s the most she can ever give him, and honesty is so _ easy_, she thinks, when the life of someone you need is hanging on the line.

He smiles a little, and they keep walking.

* * *

The snow stops. And when they are crossing a small ridge she turns her head and sees a half moon suddenly hanging right there, next to her, so close she might reach a hand out and stroke it across its one bone-coloured cheek. It’s pale and van, still trying to fight through daylight and light up the night, but its sudden presence brings with it the promise of darkness and her ultimate failure. 

It also means the skies have cleared, making the temperatures plummet even more. She shivers, and presses herself closer to John. Though he comes and goes she still senses a tension about him, bunched muscles in his shoulders and a tightening of his jaw not just from pain, but from anxiety and restiveness, and from...from _ excitement_. 

For the end of the world. He doesn't want to be caught out by it. And he doesn’t want to _ miss _ it.

She draws a hacking breath to once more challenge his belief in Joseph's apocalypse, then changes her mind. What does it matter? It would only serve to antagonise him, rile him, and they would be nowhere closer to agreement. 

She shivers again, caught in the threads of his conviction, remembering her dreams of starless skies and tumbling moons. Ash and pumice and snowfall made out of dead birds. She looks to her side again. The half moon hasn’t moved from its place, it’s still hanging there, right by her shoulder, steady and safe in the sky. 

Then the trees finally thin out and through them she can see the ugly, squat buildings and chain link fencing that heralds John’s Gate. She notes blearily that at this close distance his awful ‘Yes’ sign does show up just fine against the backdrop of snow covered mountains. For a second she looks further, past the sign and past the sharp, winding peaks, because she knows that beyond them hovers freedom. Outside Hope County. Far away. 

She also knows that her way out of here won’t go over those mountains, that it would be impossible. Suicide. She needs to get back down towards Falls End and try to leave across the somewhat flatter terrain. If what John and Joseph has told her is true then there ought to be no more roadblocks, no more patrols; all the members of the Project at Eden’s Gate hiding away in Faith’s bunker, and in John’s. A comparatively free run, if she can find a way through or over the imploded tunnels. 

But first she must get that far.

Still in among the trees, John slightly behind her, she pulls her focus away from the mountains and the dream of freedom, and checks the area immediately surrounding the bunker. 

Empty.

The entrance is gaping wide open, but there are no snipers, no guards, no grunts lugging crates around. The effect is eerie, discombobulating, and she strains her eyes against the pussyfooting dusk. 

And then she sees. 

Right in front of the entrance, illuminated by one harsh strip light, stands Joseph. Tall, still, hands on hips. No aviators. Waiting. She can’t see his face very clearly from this distance, but she can see from his stance that he’s impatient. Angry. Furious even, the rigid lines of his contours cutting viciously into the space he occupies.

She disregards that he is so sure of his strength and abilities that he stands out there alone and unguarded, she ignores what it might mean. She turns to John, sees with a glance that he’s wholly present, that his eyes are on her and only her.

“John. This is it. Joseph is over there.” John looks across her shoulder and fastens his eyes on Joseph, then back on her. “I can’t go any closer, you know I can’t. It’s goodbye here. I...you…” She cuts herself off. What could she possibly say that would adequately convey just what had taken place here; in Hope, and between them? The emotions and actions forced so deep into her that they are now part of her epidermis, her blood, her sinews and her marrow?

She can’t. So she won’t try. She nods at him instead, just once, then turns to leave.

His gaze is steady on the side of her away-turned face.

“I’m not sorry,” he tells her.

That could mean many things, of course it could, but she knows him well enough now to understand exactly what it is he’s saying. 

Even so, it’s still too late. 

It’s too late even as she spins around, hair a halo around her, to flee. 

His grip on her neck is of iron, despite his weakened condition. He pulls her back, then forces her down, holds her in the snow. She makes some warped angels in it as she trashes like an injured animal.

“You...you...you promis..._ John_!”

“Joseph!” he calls out, voice strong and sure and not at all reciting poetry anymore. “Over here!”

She twists enough in his grip that she can see his face, and oh, it hurts him, to manhandle her this way, he’s really too injured to do this. But as always he spins his pain about his fingers, weaves it into a heavy blanket with which to keep her to the ground. She aims a vicious kick towards his shins, but he holds her firm and manages to stay out of reach.

“Did you really think I would let you go, that I would allow you to die?” he whispers into the cold air above her, his betrayal turning into something horrifically tangible with frost.

”You like me too, don’t you?” she bites out, but she speaks around a mouthful of snow, making her voice wet like sobs.

He doesn’t answer, and then Joseph’s boots come into her field of vision and she’s easily hoisted onto her feet by the back of her stolen coat. She’s released as soon as she’s steady on the ground, and she whirls around to face him.

This was a mistake, she knows immediately. An enormous mistake. She should have just tried to run straight away.

Because she forgets for a moment that she should be nowhere near him, that the risk is far too great. The urge for his touch masters her, trusses her and binds her, and she’s pulled forward by it, just that one little step that separates them.

And she’s not even ashamed of the brief relief she feels, of the way she falls into his arms. Of how she rubs her face into the side of his neck when he embraces her. 

“Joseph,” she whispers. “John is so badly injured. Please make sure he’ll be fine.”

She senses rather than sees the answering reaction, how his arms tighten around her too hard, a faint rumble from within his chest. And it’s not entirely in response to her having caused serious injury to his younger brother.

She had sounded too worried. Too overwrought. Like she _ cared _ too much_. _

“You almost took a second brother from me,” he speaks into her hair as John comes to stand next to him, back straight and lips white and eyes diving like birds through sound-waves of time. 

She lets go of him.

“This time I didn’t _ mean _ it,” she says clearly, chin up, nails digging viciously into the palms of her hands, “and I brought him here. So you can help him.”

She steps backwards, one step, two steps, inches out of his embrace, and Joseph lets his arms fall from her, studying her calmly. She finds his naked eyes as terrifying as always, they suck in the acute sharpness of the air and the primal indifference of the ancient mountain ranges surrounding them. His hair is loose and falling over his shoulders and he seems taller somehow, larger, a being emanating puissance, a creature casually straddling the line to the supernatural.

He shakes his head now while he studies her, head at a slight tilt.

“Perhaps not, but still you wreaked chaos. _ Incendiary_, I told you, and I kept you in winter to chill your fire, but it didn’t help, did it?”

He throws his arms out and speaks the words as if he rules the seasons, as if he alone called forth the cold and frost purely as a means to contain her. She would like to protest, laugh at him, but she’s lost her grip on time long since back, and she can no longer pile the months in the right order and tell him what a raging fantasist he is.

She can’t.

What difference would it make? He’s so certain he owns this _ end _ of his. His Armageddon. He's holding it delicately balanced in one hand as if it’s a jewel gleaming red and he’s so _ sure _ he is its master.

“I remember you, the way you looked the first time I saw you walk towards me in my church. Oh how I _ remember _ you, Morn.”

It’s the first time she’s heard her name from his lips, and the effect is devastating. John began using it freely as soon as she realised that they’d known it all along, strengthening a hated but mutual bond, but from Joseph it signifies possession, absolute power, great enough to almost knock her to her knees. 

She takes another step back, inches away, tries to reach for one of her stolen guns as discreetly as possible. His eyes never leave her, but still he allows her to create distance between them as he continues.

“You looked so very young. Innocent and scared and out of your depth. But so incredibly stubborn. I knew even before you cuffed me that you would be trouble, that I would struggle to leash you. And such ruckus you caused, before I finally could attempt to bring you to heel.” He smiles a little, as if he’s reminiscing on fond memories. “You learned so quickly to kill and destroy, break things, and you blazed quite the trail through my devoted, didn’t you, even after it became clear that I would ultimately rule you. Look at you. Even now you scheme and resist and fight. But this you must know…”

He moves so sudden, so fast, is on her even as she draws the gun. He gets a grip around the wrist of the hand holding the weapon, and the strength he employs is otherworldly to her, bone grinding against bone and the loss of blood and sensation in her fingers.

The gun falls to the ground, sinks down into the snow.

“...your fire is bright, and it is only mine. I alone decide how high it must rise and how low it might burn.”

He spins her, pulls her back harshly against his chest, holds her in a hard embrace with one arm over her throat. His heart beating against her back, his beard and long hair tickling her ear, her cheek. In an awful echo from when they first truly captured her, that night in Joseph’s cabin, John steps forward and slides his hands inside her clothes. Removes her stolen weapons, one after one, so awfully familiar with the map that is her. She meets his eyes, they are clear right now, focused on her, and even as she wants to choke him to death for betraying her she worries about him. 

And how she hates him for that.

Something brushes against her legs and she looks down as best as she can in Joseph’s hold. Wolves. A whole pack, red crossed, threatening. Low growls and bared teeth and shining amber eyes. They fan out in a rough circle around the three of them, blocking escape. But it’s Joseph’s strength alone holding her trapped, his arms are chains around her, his fervour a fine veil of steel over her hair. 

And now when he’s got her secure in a firm hold he seeks out her belly, runs his hand up and down it, and his mouth moves in silent prayer against the back of her neck. Her belly has grown even in the short while since she saw him last, is getting close to pushing against the waistband of John’s jeans.

“I’ve done everything I can to keep it safe, to protect it,” she feels the absurd need to tell him, and he interrupts his prayer, hums against her skin.

“In this I do believe you, even if plenty of your actions would seem to suggest otherwise.”

She fights against him in earnest now, tries to kick backwards, tries to break his nose with her skull.

He blocks her as an afterthought.

“Oh little one, you really did think you would be allowed to leave? Of course not. You are mine. You always were, you always will be. This looming end, it’s an end we’re both bound to. Only together. There is no other way this can go.”

He tips her head back, turns her throat into a taut bow, and he plays her so _ well_, doesn’t he? He strums on her jugular oh so deftly, makes her blood flow in streams rushing towards him even as she strains against his grip. 

“Joseph. John! Don’t do this! Don’t…”

He hushes her, even as she feels John stir right next to her. Her arm flails about until she finds his coat sleeve. 

She holds on. So many echoes.

“Look at the sky,” Joseph says, and she feels his vibrations against her back, through it, how they get stuck inside her ribs. “Take one last look.”

She's quite sure he says it to be cruel, but she looks, even as she fights his hold. The northern lights are back, she sees, seeming to beckon her with the way they swoop, urging her to run with them. To take great big steps across the sky, to use the stars as stepping stones and disappear among the lights.

But she can’t. Joseph holds her too hard. And as she watches, one of those stars fall, a streak across the heavens, across all of the green, before turning into a brief fireball as it reaches the atmosphere.

Oh, her dreams are hurting her.

She doesn’t ease her grip on John’s coat sleeve.

“‘_Know that in the end, it will be you and I, no matter what you do. No matter how you run. No matter how you fight’._”

She quotes his words back at him, spits them out into the freezing air and sees them travel upwards, taking the path she herself can never take. Unbeknownst to her they had grown roots in her mind since he first uttered them, and now she can recall them perfectly. 

“And here we are, and so it came to pass, didn’t it, Morn?”

She will be dragged underground, forced to live there with a devil. 

Two devils, she amends herself.

“I will never forgive you for this,” she forces out between clenched teeth, and she doesn’t know which one of them she is talking to. 

“Yes. Yes you will,” Joseph answers and he is so sure, so certain, and she feels how his words become part of the bridal veil of steel about her hair and forehead.

The wolves start whining and yipping and growling, anxiousness like a haze about their shaggy bodies. She sees great flocks of birds rising from the trees, painting stark silhouettes against the greens of the aurora. An icy premonition travels through her skin, into her bones.

She’s about to lose sight of the sky, of the stars and the moon and the planets, for a very long time. She’s about to lose trees, and birds, and meadow blooms. 

She’s about to become trapped in a crypt. 

She struggles more, but can’t break Joseph’s grip. And even if she did, there would be the wolves. The wolves that now whine ever louder, stubby tails between their legs, hackles raised as they too look towards the sky.

“It’s time to seek refuge,” Joseph says. “We must go underground.”

John speaks then, for the first time since he betrayed her without a trace of regret.

“No. Let’s stay up here a little longer. I want to see. I want to see it happen.”

She turns her head to look at him, take him in fully. 

He looks like shit. He looks like he’s about to drop dead, skin grey under the bruises and beard, a sheen of cold sweat on his forehead. His lips are bloodless, his pupils so unevenly dilated his entire face looks abstract. But his eyes, they _ burn_. With glee. With vengeance. With _ rapture_.

“John,” she says, and it comes out as a sob, because she’s crying now, for herself, for him, her tears freezing to ice on her cheeks even as they fall. “Oh god, _ John_.”

She’s still clinging on to his coat sleeve. She wants to let go as if he’s on fire, but she holds on, because she’s afraid that otherwise he’ll lose his very last link to humanity. It’s an irrational thought, a betrayed instinct, but she can’t shake it, and so her knuckles glow white against the black of his parka.

And Joseph, he reaches out with one hand towards John, holds her easily with just the one, such _ mockery_, and strokes him across one bruised cheek. 

“No, John. I won’t risk you. I won’t risk Morn, nor the child. We have to go now. It’s time.”

John looks at him then nods, once. Then he looks at her, and he _ smiles_, a lopsided smile, an ugly smile. There is blood on his teeth.

“Everything will be ok, Morn. You’ll see. You’ll _ see_.”

Joseph lifts her then, a fucking bridal carry, holds her so hard in such supposed tender grip that she struggles to draw a clean breath. She loses her grip on John even though she tries so hard to hold on, and hides her face against Joseph’s shearling collar when they walk through the big entrance escorted by an honour guard of beasts. 

She doesn’t _want_ to see.

It’s busy inside, men and women scurrying about everywhere, frantically preparing for years of entombment. Joseph pauses only long enough to give the orders to close down, then marches onwards, rushes down all the stairs, the sirens signalling the lock-down mode following them, echoing viciously between the bones in her skull.

Once they are down in the bowels of the bunker she bites his neck, hard, and he growls.

“Let me down. I can walk by myself.”

He hesitates for a second, then sets her on her feet, before grabbing her arm and pulling her along with him. She’s not trying to be subtle in the way she looks around, cataloguing and memorising. She’s been here before, of course, more than once, but those had been quick and dirty affairs. Now she must plan for a different kind of escape, a drawn out one, one where she’ll always be watched, one where every door in her path will be locked. One where she will have no weapons, but the life of an innocent child about her neck.

She’s still crying, but at least down here her tears are no longer turning to ice. They flow down her cheeks unhindered, salty and warm.

They keep walking through the hallways, ever downwards. John is no longer with them, and she knows that as injured as he is he has lagged behind to try to get a glimpse of the fucking apocalypse; his greatest wish, all he has ever wanted.

He’s still standing at the top of the stairs waiting for the world to burn.

Onwards, and they pass by the cells. She remembers them well. The screams, the smells. 

But this time something deviates. This time, there are familiar faces.

When she makes to pass the last cell to her left she sees flashes of black hair, then white, and she stops despite Joseph’s grip on her. Digs her heels in, clasps at the rusting bars.

Hudson. Whitehorse. She can’t see them clearly, their faces meld into each other, becomes one large mosaic of regret. But it’s definitely them. They are dirty and thin, worn and drawn, but alive. Slumped on makeshift cots inside the cells, still in their uniforms.

She can’t even remember what it felt like to wear a uniform. To have such a solid, tangible _ identity_. 

“Joey! Oh, _ Earl_.” 

Her voice animates them, and their faces become curious amalgams of conflicting emotions. Happiness to see her alive. Despair to see her down here. Even as Joseph pulls brusquely on her arms they come up to the bars, clasps her hands through them, making the metal dig unto her wrists but she doesn’t care.

They’re silent though, and so is she. What words could possibly be found to convey the wretchedness of this situation? For now it must be sufficient that they all still breathe, that they are even _ alive_. She leans her forehead briefly against Hudson’s fingers, and turns to Joseph.

“Let them go.” She doesn’t recognise her own voice, the pain, the weariness. She should be shrieking, but she can barely manage a whisper. 

Joseph studies her for a long moment, his naked eyes suddenly arctic, freezing cold, sucking her down into a maelstrom of icy water. It’s difficult to draw a breath, and she feels that she might choke on her tongue. Then he shrugs, supposedly indifferent, but she knows that he’s anything but.

“Release them,” he tells the man standing guard, impatience and frustration and a tinge of cruelty stark on his face. “She’ll believe soon enough, and then this will be an important lesson.”

The guard nods, unquestioning, and unlocks the cell door. Hudson and Whitehorse step outside slowly, carefully, like they think this is a trap, like they’ve had hope torn to pieces right in front of them several times since they came to be here. Whitehorse moves like he’s in pain, like he feels his age, wrinkles pitiless canyons deep in his face. He was an old man even before they flew into Hope County; now he’s ancient. Hudson still carries herself proudly, even though she’s been beaten down so many times since they all crashed back to the ground on their first night in this place.

She hadn’t known either of them for long before all this started, but right now they are her oldest friends.

“Go,” she whispers. “Get away. _ Please_.”

They look reluctant to do as she asks, Hudson reaching out for her, but Joseph ripping any choice away.

“Escort them out. See them away from here. Hurry, the doors will close very soon.” He jerks his head in the direction they came, the expression on his face highly inconvenienced, like throwing lives high up in the air and watching them glint in the light on their way down is a great bother to him.

The lock-down sirens continue blaring as she stands there watching their retreating backs, heartbroken to see them go, relieved that they hadn’t thought to ask her about Staci. 

Trying not to think about why Joseph would let precious bargaining chips go.

He brings her attention back to him.

“I believe you’ll have cause to regret that, Morn.”

“I hate you.”

She hurts him the only way she can right now.

He grabs her shoulders, presses her back against the bars of the empty cell, crowds so near her. And even down here, in this musty, recycled air, she can smell thunderstorms. She can smell ozone, and she can’t stand it. She tries to knee him in the groin, but he blocks her with one of his legs, shoves a thigh in between hers.

“You enervating woman. You feral little creature.”

“Go fuck yourse...”

He pushes his thumb into her mouth to silence her, presses down on her tongue, and she gags a little even as she sucks it deeper inside, tasting the worn leather of his glove. He uses his other hand to grab her hair, wrench her head back and draw a graceful line with her throat. His hips push forward against hers to hold her in place. His thumb moves in and out of her mouth, imitating the rhythm she knows his cock will take later.

“But my lust for you will never abate. There are times when I can think of nothing but having you beneath me.”

She meets his eyes square on, moves her hips against him, chasing the friction, even as her hand comes up to scratch at his face. She manages a welt down his cheek, just narrowly missing his eye, before he gets hold of her wrist. He pushes his thumb deeper down her throat and she welcomes it, she wants to choke on him. His eyes are wild, savage, blown wide open as he watches her face, and he looks ready to take her right there, up against the rusting cell bars.

“Joseph. Focus.”

She glances to the side. John has caught up with them, and it looks as though the effort has cost him. He looks worse, if that’s even possible, eyes unsteady like breaking rings on water, blood trickling from his nose. His attention is wholly on her and Joseph though, fingers twitching by his side.

Joseph pulls his thumb from her mouth with an obscene pop and gently smooths her hair back with the glove coated with her saliva. He leans down and kisses her, hungrily, proprietary, always like he’s got all the right in the world. Then he turns to John.

“You’re right, brother. Let’s continue.”

The sirens keep sounding. The doors are still open up there. 

Another few twists and turns later and John opens a door using the key around his neck. They step into a large room, and she looks around as he locks it behind her again. 

Rugs cover the floor, and paintings and photos and and bookshelves try to soften the ugly concrete walls. There are squishy-looking sofas and a large dining table. Towards the back there is an open plan kitchen, and several doors lead away from the room. Bedrooms, she presumes. 

This is clearly private living quarters for the Seeds. Remembering Joseph’s ascetic cabin, she thinks that John is behind this space. That feeling is reinforced when she recognises some of the photos on the walls. Those austere and riveting birds eye views again, of mysterious landscapes far away. 

She pulls her attention away from them. For all of the effort that has gone into making this space cozy, familiar, _ worn-in_, nothing can hide that there are no windows, no natural light. That they are buried, that the air down here can never be fresh and pure.

She can’t breathe. She’s wheezing with her attempts to draw oxygen into her lungs.

Along one wall there are a few screens, monitors. They appear to be live. In night vision she sees Fall’s End, Joseph’s compound, Dutch’s island, Faith’s bunker. Other places too. There is sophisticated radio equipment underneath the screens.

John staggers over to one of the sofas facing the monitors, sits down heavily on it, wincing in pain, smiling with joy. Joseph joins him, stretches his long legs out, relaxes, looking for all the world like he’s about to enjoy a movie.

The sirens have been silenced, she suddenly realises. 

They are locked in.

“Joseph,” she says, focuses on something she might be able to influence, do something about. “John needs medical attention.”

“And he will have it, soon. But I know he wants to see this first.”

He’s looking towards the concrete ceiling as he speaks, his eyes as wild and mad and shining as she has ever seen them. The scratch she gave him is bleeding. 

“Any time now. Any time now it shall come to pass.”

She loses whatever tenuous, slippery grip she might have had on herself.

“What? The end of the world? Your beloved Collapse? It won’t _ happen_. You’ve locked me away underground, trapped me, for a _ delusion_! You’re forcing me, and everyone else, to live inside your schizophrenic fever dreams. And it won’t happen and we’ll rot down here and die except we won’t! We’ll live as corpses!”

She can recognise the hysteria in her voice, the sound of her sanity almost splicing in two.

Joseph ignores her.

“Now,” he whispers. “_Now_. It is _done_.”

His attention is wholly on the screens. She turns too, just in time to see a fireball engulf all of Fall’s End high street.

“What…” she whispers, croaks, “what is…”

No one answers, and she sees _ more_.

She sees an entire herd of deer on fire. She sees Joseph’s church obliterated. She sees people turning to ash in seconds. 

She sees Hope County gone. 

Then the screens start flickering, and soon they are all dead, turned to white static. 

“'_So Eden sank to grief_’,” Joseph murmurs to himself, but she’s not paying him any attention, because there is something moving in her chest. It’s a bird dying, she knows, and it is its death throes making her heart beat still, not blood running through veins, not muscles contracting.

Her heart is a bird.

It’s a bird flying again and again against the cage of her ribs, until its neck is broken.

She’s on her knees on the floor, head bowed, wondering how she is still drawing breaths when she’s dead. She realises that she can hear her name being called, over and over. 

Morn. _ Morn_.

She lifts her head, looks for John and Joseph. 

They are both still sitting on the sofa, and they are both watching her. It’s John patting the space between them, and she goes, damn her, she _ goes_. They are familiar entities in a terrifying absence of a world. 

She sits down between them, exhausted, almost paralysed with despair, and Joseph leans across and presses his face against her temple.

“You know what this means?” he whispers straight into her head. “It means I was _ right…_.”

On the other side of him, out of his sight, John’s fingers alternate between clenching and stroking her thigh. She grabs his hand and holds on.

And as the shockwaves from the bombs start reaching them, making the ceiling vibrate above their heads, she feels the baby kick for the very first time. 

* * *

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lots of Robert Frost in this chapter. "The woods are lovely, dark and deep" (cont: and I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep) as quoted by Morn as she walks through the forest with John is from Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. The poem John recites back to her is Fire and Ice. "So Eden sank to grief" as said by Joseph when the world goes tits up is from Nothing Gold Can Stay.


	15. Epilogue: that beauty should pass utterly

* * *

**Epilogue: that beauty should pass utterly**

* * *

  
It’s been a harsh day. The winds have been unforgiving, the scavenging have been fruitless and survival have never before tasted quite so sour.

Of course, for Carmina Rye there is nothing else. She was born the day the world ended and really, she knows nothing firsthand of Before. She’s almost fifteen, she’s got her mother’s eyes and her father’s smile and a fierceness all of her own.

Her scavenging partner for today is a tough, shrewd old bird. Sadie her name is, and she’s foul mouthed and straight talking. She’s from Before the Bombs, and she knows a lot about how it was then. The Old World. She says that she’s lived all her life in Hope and she’ll die here too, bombed to shit or not. Carmina likes it when they’re teamed up. She learns so many new things. Or maybe old things.

It’s not dusk, not quite yet, but there’s more than a hint of it in the light. A subtle thing, like shawls of long shadows about the shoulders of the trees, a deepening of nuances, a quieting of sounds. The restlessness of night, tiptoeing just out of sight. 

They really ought to be heading back.

They’re to the north, and they’ve walked farther away from Prosperity than they normally would, farther than they _ should, _and they have reached ground higher than she’s used to. Skeletal trees in contrast with blooms so bright they hurt her eyes, and the air is slightly thinner up here. She’s tired, and she wants to go back home, but not empty handed. So she says nothing to her companion, simply carries on, even though she is uneasy. She tries to take the time to look around, settle herself with the familiarity of the long curves and sharp dips of landscape.

But it doesn’t help.

Born how she was, _ when _ she was, she is of course familiar with such notions as nuclear winters and super-blooms. She knows that they are not fallacies, that they are not abstract concepts, _ hypotheses_, but stark realities. 

That doesn’t mean that she has to _ like _ them.

Their surroundings could be called beautiful, she supposes, the colours and the wildness. The lushness. But it has always felt unnatural to her; a bloated fertility forced from a depleted earth. A corrupted beauty, a _bane._

She has never seen it outside of faded photographs, but she thinks that perhaps the asperous, verdant greenness that once was Hope County’s true guise is imprinted on her hinterbrain. So too the longing for it. And therefore, as she walks among purple flowers and vines rushing forth as violently as waterfalls, she knows on a primal level that this, this is not _ right. _Her family have lived here for generations and though she’s never experienced it for herself...she _ knows _ somehow that she should smell sap and pine and mountain blossom and desolation on a cool breeze. 

Not the sweetness of orchids and plump, ripe fruits.

“Uh huh.”

It’s Sadie. 

She’s stopped so suddenly that Carmina, distracted as she is, walks straight into the back of the older woman. Sadie barely reacts though, focused entirely on something in front of her. Carmina steadies herself and takes a couple of steps forward so that she gets up alongside. She takes in what has captured her companion’s attention so utterly.

Or tries to.

Carmina, young as she is, doesn’t consider herself particularly sensitive. Forced to pragmatism pretty much from birth, she is forthright and hardened, shaped by the fight for survival. Forced to grow up too fast she is not given to whims and flights of fancy. 

But this...this is...she feels...she can feel…

She looks. And she looks.

She stands right on the edge of a hole in the ground. An enormous hole, a gaping _ crater, _with the other side so very far away.

Broken trees and torn metal and chain link and parts of buildings are spread around the parameter of the cavernous maw, along with the usual fixtures and fittings of human habitation. She can see pieces of bedsteads, chairs, crates and boxes interwoven with orchids. She sees twisted weapons and old books and remains of clothing, bound firm to the earth with ivy.

She can’t see the bottom. 

She wants to turn around and run, but forces herself to stay put.

There’s a reaving anguish about the place, an eldritch, oppressive atmosphere. Even as used as she is to nature torn violently asunder, this is overwhelming to her senses, making it hard for her to concentrate. Take it in. And it takes many long moments before her eyes can pinpoint some of the _ wrongness _ that her subconscious has already noted. 

Some of the broken trees, clawing at the sky like drowners, are still bleeding sap. The thrown about furnishings and building parts aren’t nearly as overgrown as all the other old places she’s seen in the valley.

Whatever happened here...it happened after the bombs. Whatever happened here had been so decisive and final that the earth itself still seems to mutely shriek to her about it

And the carnage seems to originate from within the crater, some kind of power colossal enough to compel the entire interior to spew outwards, taking trees and surrounding nature with it. It must have been some kind of explosion, Carmina thinks, causing a fiercely violent seismic riptide, more or less turning everything inside out.

No external force had ravaged this place. It had come from the _ inside_.

She takes a step back, then catches herself.

“What _ is _ this?”

Sadie stands looking at that great wound in the earth, hip cocked and chewing on a twig she picked up a couple hours back. Carmina hopes it’s ok to gnaw on, that it isn’t contaminated with Christ knows what. Finally she speaks.

“We’ve gone too far, kid. Taken a wrong turn too. This is the Baptist’s place.”

“The Baptist?”

“John Seed. Brother of Joseph Seed, you know, the doomsday cult guy who turned out to be right about the _ doom _ part? Eden’s Gate. Well, this was John’s. “John’s Gate”, they called it. Disused missile silo turned bunker, all a-ready for the end of the world. He tortured people here. Did terrible things, trying to _ cleanse _ them, making them ready for a new paradise. Fat lot of good that did.”

Carmina stares at all the brokenness, listens to the wind whisper and cry. She pulls her mother’s coat closer around herself, rubs her arms. She has heard about Eden’s Gate, but only in hushed sentences spoken over her head.

“But what happened here?”

Sadie shakes her head.

“It’s all a bit unclear. Right before everything blew sky high John and Joseph went underground here, along with a whole bunch of Joseph’s brainwashed flock. They had the Deputy with them as well.”

“The...Deputy?”

“Yeah. Not from around here. Delicate little thing. No business in law enforcement, I always thought, but after a few run-ins with the cult she turned into a killing machine. She tried to liberate Hope County from the Seeds, from Eden’s Gate. She failed but, of course, ultimately it didn’t matter. The bombs fell, and, well...”

“But why did she _ shelter _ with them if she tried to stop them?”

Sadie clicks her tongue.

“Don’t know. People said some weird stuff. Rumours, all of it. The general consensus is that she was their enemy. But some say lover.”

“To whom?”

“Oh, does it matter?” Sadie grunts, “it’s all bullshit anyway. People had nothing better to do than sit underground and gossip and make shit up for fourteen long years. And any chance of knowing the real truth went poof in giant mushroom clouds.”

She chews viciously on her twig, jerks her chin towards the destruction.

“Anyway, about seven years ago, give or take, something or someone made this whole place fall in on itself. Bad time for it. You know, the world was still dark then, a storm. Fucking mess.” She shakes her head. “We had some survivors of that shitshow come a-knocking on our bunker door. Took them in, of course.”

“And the Deputy? The Seeds?”

Sadie throws the twig to the ground, grinds it into the dirt with the heel of her boot.

“No idea. Most of our new bunker mates agreed, though, that she survived the implosion of this place. Left across the mountains with one of the brothers. No word on the other. Anyway, no one’s heard or seen from any of them since.”

She stays staring at the crater, shrugs.

“She might be dead. She might not be.”

Carmina tries to build a picture, but she can’t. There are just fragments, no pieces large enough to make even a suggestion of a whole. And the questions are greater than the fragments, and she can’t line them all up right in her mind.

“So which one of them did she leave with?”

“Oh, no one is quite sure. The tattooed, intense one.” 

Sadie cackles as if she’s just made the best joke, but Carmina doesn’t get it. Then she turns abruptly serious, bites the laughter into pieces.

“They had a small girl with them as they went, apparently. A dark haired waif, it’s said, with eyes like those night shining clouds you used to see in summer. Deputy’s daughter. No word on the daddy.”

Carmina tries to take it all in. Can’t.

“But...so no one knows what really happened here?”

“No. It’s real weird. And the survivors we took in said the strangest shit. Said the little girl could _ do _ things,” the way she empathises “do” makes Carmina shiver even if she doesn’t know why.

Sadie chuckles drily.

“Drivel, of course, straight from the mouths of cretins in thrall of Joseph for many years before the bombs even fell. Then locked up with him underground after. No wonder they went batshit. They were always the types to see the face of Jesus Christ in their fucking Captain Crunch.”

She shrugs, scratches her neck.

“In the end of the day, only thing anyone can agree on is that the Seeds were very bad men. As for the Deputy...well. She tried to do good, I suppose. She failed.”

Carmina considers this as the heavy atmosphere pulls at her hair with bony fingers, and she can’t help feeling that Sadie’s assessment of this Deputy is harsh.

‘I want to know more about her.”

“We need to head back, kid.”

Sadie spins in place and starts to leave, continues speaking over her shoulder. 

“Right now you know what I know. Ask your parents. I think they knew her. Think they knew John and Joseph Seed too.”

“I will,” says Carmina. The wind weeps and wails and snarls in her face, and she shivers again. “I’ll ask them when I get back.”

She starts following Sadie, slowly at first, then faster. Suddenly she can’t leave quickly enough.

They walk away together, and Carmina looks behind her one final time and thinks that she won’t come back here. 

Not ever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aargh, I feel quite...bereft? This story’s constantly been somewhere at the front of my mind for almost six months and now it’s finished. What shall I do with myself?!
> 
> AND this turned into the longest thing I’ve ever written. To think it was meant to be something lighter and short: more gratuitous, less overwrought. Which….well. The jury’s out. 
> 
> There’s the vaguest chance there might be a sequel to this, but for now I’m happy with how I’ve ended it. I’d really, really love to know what you all think :)
> 
> And I’d also like to take the opportunity to strew a million thanks for kudos, comments, bookmarks, general cheerleading and for gracefully putting up with the grammatical fuck-ups of a non-native speaker. This fandom is so goddamned awesome, and you guys are the best.


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